Alicinations

The Hunting of Alice in Seven Fits

2012-01-13T13:27:00.000-08:00

This text originally appeared as an article in:

Knight Letter

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Winter 2011

Volume II Issue 17

Number 87

The images were selected to this post.

Elena Kalis

1. River

Alice was raised on a ship of dreams, in a liquid looking-glass, following the currents of desire, imagination, and curiosity. She was born on a river, with its switchbacks and reflections, following and fighting the flow, in the geometry of laughter and strange paradoxes. We do not read a book; we dive into it. It surrounds us, constantly. Sitting on the bank, Alice would ask herself: and what is the use of a book without pictures and conversations? Alice has been perhaps the most illustrated book of all time. This shows that we continue to answer the question that Alice did not ask: and what is the use of a book with pictures and conversations?

A river child, Alice moves amongst mazes where one is lost and found in mysterious rhythms. The great paradox running through Alice’s adventures, according to Deleuze, is the loss of her own name, her infinite identity, her eternal becoming. When the caterpillar asks, Who are you? Alice does not know the answer. I know who I was . . . but I think I must have been changed several times since then. In her typically paradoxical manner, Alice says no, but also says yes: I know who I am; the transformation continues. Like Alice, when it seems we know who we are, we’re already someone else, and what we think we are, is what we once were. And the world that we know is changing every second. The girl, born into the River of Heraclitus, knows that being and nonbeing are in constant conversation, in an eternal cycle that is being created at all times.

When Alice says that she only knows who she was, she is saying that we are always in motion. And when she was drawn by John Tenniel in Victorian England, a tradition of Alices was born that would follow in this path. But Alice is no longer the Victorian Alice, instead she is a living kaleidoscope of all of the possibilities. How many artists were in fact driven by the need to overcome the stereotypical imagery of the girl and her amazing world, and by the quest for new adventures in expression? Instead of the question “Who is Alice?” there are now paths leading to that which Alice might come to be. . . .

Abelardo Morell

As the twentieth century progressed, the concept of illustration underwent profound transformations, in dialogue with the radical changes happening in the visual arts. Artists broke down the barriers between the outside world and the experiences of the mind, questioning the idea of a mimetic approach to illustration. The transformations in the universe of the arts and counterculture were re-creating Alice’s experiences in the mêlée of her dream world and wonderland. At the end of that century, Alice’s looking-glass shattered into a million pieces, spreading within the collective imagination new meta-Alices in a nonsensical, magical hourglass of alicinations.

The artists and illustrators were driven to discover or invent new relationships between text and pictures. The identity of the subject was subverted by the allure of the unknown and inexplicable. Rather than repeat, illustrators started to provoke and transgress. They questioned the classic idea that art should imitate or interpret an exterior reality. They also began to seek out subversion, paradox, and experimentation. The present time is filled with otherness and difference. Intertextual readings, metalanguage, multiple assemblies, nonlinear narratives. Abracadabra!

Suzy Lee

Since the beginning of the last century, each decade, through its different visions and styles, created its own Alices: art nouveau, art deco, surrealist, pop, psychedelic, futuristic, Gothic, naïve, ethnic, dark, steampunk, pop surrealist. Alice is, by turns, a sweet and ingenuous girl, a questioning feminist, a perverted child, a mad and bloody assassin, a drugged adult, a seeker of worlds beyond conscious thought, a delirious psychedelicist, or an armor-clad and shielded warrior, always multiple and mutating.

Alice moves beyond illustration into art, into movies, into fashion, into animation, into games, into comics, into the mix that now reigns and requires other comprehensions. And they all coexist in our alicinatory times of mixtures and countless seams and transitions through multiple networks. I do not know of another girl with so many faces, a traveler from an imaginary world, bringing with her the paradoxes that defy our senses and our common sense. The Alice books do not fit into any mold or explanation, instead spreading a worldwide net of creative possibilities.

We live in an image culture of collage and montage, of velocity and voraciousness: one image quickly devours another, transforming into another image, ready to be devoured, Norval Baitello explains. Images seduce and absorb us, but with the loss of our ability to create consistent connections and sensible relations, the devouring process is reversed: We go from indiscriminately devouring images to being indiscriminately devoured by them. We lose ourselves in labyrinthine deserts, and instead of always seeing the otherness in that which is the same, different Alices upon each reading, we find ourselves mired in the sad adventure of always seeing sameness in the other; we see nothing new in the thousands of Alices in circulation. Decipher me or I will devour you.

Querida Companhia

The story of Alice is already so well known that it becomes fragmented, repeated, displaced, deconstructed, gnawed upon by artists from everywhere, in every way. With her serpentine neck, Alice navigates among hybrid identities, blends, contrasts, oddities, merchandise, gato por lebre, and senselessness that everybody buys and believes without understanding why. She sets out for the new and looks back to reinvent herself all over again. This is Alice. Alice is all of them and none of them, and she opens herself up like the largest kaleidoscope ever seen. Good-bye, feet!

Alice strolls along the margins and between the lines; she crosses borders, a traveler through the unknown, but also through stock phrases, clichés, the commonplace, distortions and cheap simplifications that insist on impoverishing life and art. As we travel through Alice’s landscapes, we also travel through our own interior landscapes. New Alices learn that a path has not been set; rather, it opens as one goes forward.

Sissi Venturin

Alice is an invitation to duplicity (for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people), multiplicity (she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them), becoming (I know who I was, but I think I must have been changed several times since then), and the loss of one’s own name (This must be the wood where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of MY name when I go in?). We must create new forms of expression to give way to new Alices more sensitive to these subtle and free becomings . . .

McLuhan understood that Lewis Carroll peered into the looking-glass and saw the time and space of the electronic man. Before Einstein, Carroll had already penetrated the ultrasophisticated universe of relativity. Every moment in Alice has its own time and space. And the fragmentation of time into a multitude of small fractions of the present joins with the fragmentation of space into a multicolored, transfigured kaleidoscope. Pieces of Alices from around the world give themselves over to the tasks of living, eating, drinking; they become involved in an endless party and its infinite possibilities.

Why continue living as Alice seated at the table set for tea, sullen and silent, as depicted by Tenniel? What we now seek is a way to remain time’s friends (as the Hatter suggests) and to free ourselves from the senseless and repetitive rituals in which the guests at the tea party find themselves trapped. It is an invitation to new Alices—nomadic, mutating Alices, multiple and simultaneous. Marcel Duchamp was “convinced that, like Alice in Wonderland, [tomorrow’s artists] will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression.”

2. Underground

In Carroll’s own illustrations from the Under Ground manuscript, Alice is spontaneous and spiritual, but also anguished and melancholic, close to the idealized image of the artist’s soul. She echoes romantic myths of the Pre-Raphaelites and their languid feminine figures, with oblique gazes and overflowing locks that would enchant the surrealists. She seems closer to a magical world than a logical one. At the same time, we glimpse hybrid and metamorphic creatures in the book that invoke the grotesque beings of Hieronymus Bosch. Are these drawings not among the precursors of the surrealist bestiaries, a mix of dream worlds and fabulous monsters?

But when the expanded work was published in London, it was illustrated by John Tenniel, a famous illustrator from the Victorian periodical Punch. A commonly held belief remains that rarely was an author as well served by an illustrator as was Lewis Carroll by John Tenniel, even though the work has been illustrated subsequently by thousands of artists throughout the world.

We still confuse the images and the text, which together seem to tell the same story. We often lose sight of whether the images are in fact faithful to the text or whether we create, from them, a new text. Is fidelity possible among images and texts of these Alices? Does Tenniel’s Alice remain the most perfect illustration of the work for the contemporary eye?

Who passively defies the Queen, with her arms crossed?

Who confronts a mad cat, in search of new directions, with her hands behind her back?

Polixeni Papapetrou

If I empathetically project myself onto Tenniel’s Alices, I feel like a tamed and contained Victorian girl who would not dirty her dress, would not throw herself into the well, would not unfold herself into a serpent to discover its dangers, would not think of eating bats. (These Alices, who are in the text, do not appear in Tenniel’s pictures.) Tenniel’s Alice doesn’t change, and awakens at the end of the book essentially the same. Really?

Alice is not transformed; Alice is transformation. How many adventures might she still experience, how many paths would she choose, how many Alices might still come into being? If life is a dream, Alice is unable to wake up; instead, she awakens. I am talking not only about what was written, but also about understanding that we ourselves are different with every reading, and that new Alices are born within us. Alice extends beyond the borders of the book and will live a multitude of adventures among constellations of dreams, thoughts, and emotions.

Tenniel’s Alice sits sulking at the table where tea is served, without free will. Similarly, all those who insist on reproducing the commonplace formulas remain trapped in a repetitive tea-time ritual. Many of today’s Alices unfold in new manners of expression and pictures, awakening in different arts, taking on a life of their own in a multitude of cultures. Considering these friends from modern times, what Alices are we capable of?

Through readings and re-readings, I have selected artists in seven groups, in which I seek out:

• Enigmatic Alices that destabilize the commonplace and suggest new readings: Alain Gauthier, Dušan Kállay, Jonathan Miller, Martin Barooshian, Nicole Claveloux, and Unsuk Chin.

• Metalinguistic Alices that reflect on language and expression and challenge the standards of representational art: Abelardo Morell, Anthony Browne, Catherine Anne Hiley, John Vernon Lord, Ralph Steadman, and Suzy Lee.

• Conceptual Alices that inhabit labyrinths and paradoxes: Randy Greif, Iassen Ghiuselev, Julia Gukova, Luiz Zerbini, Oleg Lipchenko, and Sergey Tyukanov.

• Alices that cross intertextual borders and visit characters from other stories: John Rae, Dorothy Furness, and Edward Bloomfield.

• Alices of metamorphic bodies challenging hybrid identities and erotic dreams: Arlindo Daibert, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Tania Ianovskaia, Tanya Miller, and Vince Collins.

• Alices that journey through the world of dreams and the marvelous, proposing magical games: DeLoss McGraw, Elena Kalis, Kokusyoku Sumire, Maggie Taylor, Phoebe in Wonderland, and Alice-themed tea houses in Tokyo.

• Some Alices that journey through leftover nightmares and challenge the frontiers between the mind and the unconscious: American McGee, Anna Gaskell, Camille Rose Garcia, Alice in the Underworld (Dark Märchen Show), Trevor Brown, and Jan Švankmajer.

Alice is Alices is Alice.

3. Marvelous

Let us now journey through time with Alice herself as our guide on her adventures in being depicted by artists other than Tenniel.

Alice became lost in imaginary labyrinths until she arrived at the Gradiva art gallery, created by André Breton in1937. She saw the name Alice above the door, among other surrealist muses. She then read a passage from the gallery’s pamphlet:

From the book of children’s images to the book of poetic images.

Surrealism had transported the Victorian girl to the book of poetic images. That was when she saw a grin hovering in the air that said Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole or through the looking-glass encourage us to seek out other cracks leading to the marvelous.

Lewis Carroll left the doorway to our dreams open a crack. Alice went through it and found herself in a labyrinth of mirrors, an endless game, projections of herself created by surrealist artists. Surrealist muse, sphinx, femme enfant, Alice unfolds into multiple visions of a modern myth. She enters portals to the unknown, plumbing the depths of the unconscious, rites of passage; the revelation of a sibylline and archaic female, she becomes mixed with landscapes of a world in ruins, in the echoes and phantasms of the nightmares of war and of the dawning of a new world.

Carroll was broadly shared by the surrealists. He was read, and often invoked, by Paul Eluard, Gisele and Mario Prassinos, Guy Levis Mano, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Henri Parisot, Frédéric Delanglade, Henri Toyen, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalì, among others. Max Ernst would illustrate some of his words, and confess that he was his second favorite writer after Lautréamont.

Continuing her journey, Alice entered a portal and was taken aback by a series of prints and illustrations by Salvador Dalì that depicted her adventures in Wonderland (Maecenas, 1969). She became a mysterious figure jumping rope through a landscape filled with Dalì’s obsessions, such as the melting clocks of the Persistence of Memory series. The clock became the Hatter’s table, set for tea, with time madly stopped at six in the afternoon. If the clocks reveal the mechanics of measuring linear time, the melting clocks refer to relative time and the universes of memory and pleasure.

Salvador Dali

Dalì simulated delirium, speculating on the propriety of the uninterrupted becoming of every object upon which he carried out his paranoid activity. Dalì’s counterfeit paranoia, the “paranoiac-critical method,” allowed him to reorder the world according to his inner obsessions. The limits between the real and the imagined became ambiguous. And his paintings began to represent a space in which everything that can be seen is potentially something else. Wonder, dreams, and the unconscious serve as the stages for metamorphoses, where the objects, symbols of irrational desires, are subjected to sudden mutations, an uninterrupted becoming. Clocks, mushrooms, caterpillars, butterflies, cards, shapes are constantly being diluted, blending and transforming. Wanderer in a dream world, Alice is stunned to discover that everything is in a constant creative flux.

Salvador Dali

The constant presence of Alice’s shadow in all of Dalì’s images refers to the Romantic dilemma of the double identity, suggesting a loss of bodily identity. In Dalì, Alice was a faceless silhouette, a mirror of herself in shadow and reflection. Surrealist Alices are bodies in metamorphosis and becoming, in a space of dreams and wonder. Dalì’s Alice gives way to the ghostly and kaleidoscopic presence of a multitude of double Alices, nameless in the contemporary imagination. Dalì’s Alice opens doors to new Alices, who ask new questions of the smile in the air—without Dalì.

4. Fabulous monsters

Alice went to visit the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, who illustrated the two Alice books in two rare and strange Japanese editions. His drawings went beyond the limits of conventional illustrations, creating unexpected relationships between pictures and conversations. They are collages that reinvent the world imagined by Lewis Carroll, proposing new mysteries and paradoxes along a surrealist journey.

Svankmajer

Metamorphosis in surrealism became a violent and animalistic need, straining the limits of human nature. Life is a dream. The surrealist monsters showed Alice that subjectivity was not that safe and stable place that she had been made to believe. Alice found herself inserted into an imaginary jungle of sphinxes and chimeras, among collages with multiple identities that emerged from subterranean, strange, and archaic worlds. The drawings were mounted and dismounted, metamorphosing between images of biology and botany, dolls, Victorian illustrations, and sex symbols—double, multiple becomings.

In the Jabberwocky’s portmanteau words, there was a bestiary of beings such as toves and mome raths. Word collages were turned by Švankmajer into monster collages, hybrid and enigmatic beings. Alice’s body was unstable and mutating, a puzzle without any right answer. Alice is a portmanteau of impossibilities. When the caterpillar asks Alice, Who are you?, Švankmajer’s Alice is a drawing, a doll, a mushroom, lace, texture, pulse. The caterpillar and Alice meet with a vital élan, filled with the power of becoming.

Svankmajer

Alice continued along and watched fragments of Švankmajer’s experimental animated film that revealed unsuspected dimensions of herself. Much of the animation was created through an explosive mixture of stop motion and a wide variety of surreal objects and hybrid, bizarre bodies. The characters might be played by machines, socks, clay, antique dolls and toys, meat, and even skeletons and the remains of bodies used in taxidermy experiments. The settings were ruins: decadent, subterranean landscapes, transformed into a somber and dissolute atmosphere.

Švankmajer adapted Carroll’s story according to a personal dialogue with the dream world and his own childhood: a world inhabited by desires, latent sexuality, fears, anxieties, mysteries, and obsessions. We are also confronted with our own childhood, our own Alices, fears, and shadows: inner alchemies. Each time we watch the film, we dream anew and Alice becomes a different one, among silences and whispers. I am reminded of the letter Paulo Mendes Campos gave to his daughter, Maria de Graça, when she turned fifteen and received Alice as a present: This book is crazy, Maria, the meaning is inside of you.

5. Merchandise

Alice looked at her reflection in the water of the river, and it transformed into the silly, naïve girl in a blue apron known by many, for many years, as the “real” Alice. Her story, recreated in a cartoon by Walt Disney’s dream factory, would become powerful, diluting the collective imagination, and stunting the metamorphoses of the girl who was constantly in transformation. Inspired by Tenniel’s original illustrations, this Alice would turn into the new ultimate icon, imposing for a long time a fixed and hegemonic public identity on the girl of many faces.

In the cartoon, Alice laments the fact that nonsense has been converted into moral lessons and good behavior. Like Walt Disney’s princesses, the cartoon Alice is a passive and defenseless young woman facing a crazy, senseless world. Wonderland showed insanity to her so that she might desire sanity even more. It showed misfits, so that she might want to fit in. The characters showed her how the system worked, so that she could learn to integrate herself into it, toe the line, and assume her role in society.

Alice realized that Disney’s cartoon simultaneously brought her story to the world and hid her critical and subversive potential. But at the same time, Disney’s movie became a countercultural and psychedelic icon in the 1960s as an ode to surrealism, insanity, and creativity. Alice was curious to see how each work remained open to multiple, contradictory, and oftentimes paradoxical readings.

Alice discovered that many years later, at the start of the twenty-first century, Disney would produce another film about her, this time directed by a dark and imaginative director named Tim Burton. In this film, after many years, Alice returns to “Underland” in order to defeat the terrible dragon, the Jabberwocky (sic), as had been foreseen in a prophecy. Everyone asks her: Are you the real Alice?

She decides that she is not. In this movie, the nonsense is contained within reductionist formulas of a hero’s journey. Alice is expected to become a warrior, to defeat and destroy the enemy in a Manichean world, to kill the dragon in order to awaken and assume her colonizing role in England’s world domination. Alice takes over her father’s project of conquering China.

The real me, Alice thought, is not a warrior, but an explorer. She does not kill the enemy, but learns through him. She does not want to take over the world, but instead comes to know herself. For her, Wonderland is not a battlefield, but a voyage, a game, a garden, and an adventure. That is why this movie is so unbearable, Alice thought. Because it shows the nightmare and the insanity that we now inhabit.

Once more, thanks to Tim Burton and Disney, with their considerable investment in promoting the film, Alice’s presence in the collective imagination was strengthened in an unprecedented manner. This is not only because of what the film shows, but because of what it stimulates. Even with the insistent repetition of symbols of consumption, possibilities for new becomings and friendships are reborn over time. Countless creative and existentialist possibilities might arise from among both those pleased and displeased with the film. The film offered them a chance to reread the book, to discover other images, other means of expression, other voyages; to produce, to create, to feel, to discover, and ultimately dialogue with and embark on an adventure, each in his or her own way, in this exciting world that still challenges us to take the plunge.

6. Arisu

Kokusyoku Sumire

The first time I read Alice, I imagined myself falling down with her until we reached the other side of the world, where people lived upside down. For a child in Brazil, this meant Japan. Many years later, I find that Japan is home to some of the most stimulating Alices alive today, in ordinary life in the city of Tokyo, sharing dreams, creating new worlds. Girls and boys who are children and adults at the same time dress as Victorian dolls, reinventing John Tenniel’s illustrations, among other passions and pursuits. With gestures, mannerisms, aprons, lace, socks, ties, and ruffles, Alice is becoming a new way of living the counterculture in alicinatory neighborhoods such as Harajuku, Shinjuku, and Akihabara, places where otherness and altered-ness are celebrated, embracing the wonder within the contemporary cartography, journeying through time and the invention of oneself.

The birth of the Gosu-rori (Gothic Lolita) culture coincided with the translation of Fushigi no kuni no arisu by Sumiko Yagawa, as Sean Somers showed me in his thought-provoking article Arisu in harajuku. She is my white rabbit, leading me to this surprising, and in large part misunderstood, reality. Yagawa stimulated the blooming of a counterculture that frees the imagination from repressive and repetitive social routines, opening the possibility of new friendships with time.

Wonderland (Fushigi) reveals an atmosphere of sensations, including charm and wonder, but also mystery, strangeness, and fear. Fushigi no kuni no arisu was translated in order to penetrate the existential needs of a generation, particularly the marginalized and outcast youth, who could, in this way, face malaise, depression, violence, and rejection through the wonder manifested in everyday life.

Fushigi is not an inducement of daydreams or escapism, Somers points out, but a creative therapy and an “alchemy of metamorphoses,” a subversion of the standards for women, breaking down barriers between ugly and beautiful, sweet and perverse, violent and delicate. Lolitas seek to prolong their childhood and question dominant culture in a childish manner and a dollish pose, in a game of being and nonbeing that crosses the line between art and life. Do Hello Kitties eat bats? Do bats eat Hello Kitties?

Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the practice of wandering metamorphosis is now part of the logic of contemporary fashion. The creation and expression of oneself as an exercise in creativity has now become a marketing gimmick. We live in a culture of “differences” that combines alleged creativity with a desire to be unique, but only according to static formulas of existence. As Cristiane Mesquita points out: “Clothing serves as a means of expression in an existential landscape. But fashion also offers the market ephemeral and easily substituted identities.” How can one be distinguished from the other? Alice is our challenge.

7. Fringe

Yayoi Kusama

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland, stated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who since the 1950s has alicinated psychedelic worlds. In paintings, collages, poems, daring acts, sculptures, fashions, weirdness, and surprising installations, she shares patterns, repetitions, obsessions, and visions of the infinite.

Kusama was hospitalized for years for mental disorders, and her works reflect her challenging perception of reality, where the boundaries between the body, the self, and the environment mix and mingle in proliferations of repetitive dots that pulse and vibrate with the cosmos. We’re all mad here . . . otherwise you wouldn’t have come, said the Cheshire Cat. Kusama plays with mirrors and kaleidoscopes to produce bright patterns with stunning effects, incorporating an almost hallucinatory vision of reality, in an experience that is at once sensory and spiritual.

Yayoi Kusama

In the 1960s, the artist went to New York, where she carried out a series of political “happenings,” under the philosophy “Love forever,” promoting a reaction against the Vietnam War and all authoritarian, repressive, and conservative powers. These body paintings and orgiastic choreographies were performed before the sculpture of Alice in Central Park, in 1968. For Kusama, Alice was the grandmother of the hippies, and she became Alice, a year after Grace Slick sang “White Rabbit” with the Jefferson Airplane.

Kusama arrived in Central Park as the Hatter, with her nude dancers, inviting everyone to drink the tea that was being served under the magic mushroom. Red, green, and yellow dots could represent the earth, the sun, or the moon, according to Kusama. She painted little circles on the bodies of those present, so that people would divest themselves of their outlines to return “to the nature of the universe.” From a criticism of the repressive powers symbolized by the social routines of Alice’s teatime, Kusama has moved towards friendship with time, crossing boundaries between bodies and cosmic rhythms, diluting the boundaries of the self.

Alice is able to disturb, to intrigue, to destabilize. She puts us in contact with uncertainty, unpredictability, turbulence, the untamed. Breaking with hegemonic models of existence, the new Alices must invent universes by paying attention to their own inner landscapes. Alices give themselves over to existence and say: I am a question.

And if Alice were not in the dress, but in its folds? If she were not in the blue material, but in the shadow and the light of a multicolor prism? If she were not in the hair, but in the rumors of its movement? Not in the apron, but in the traces of an intimate encounter? Not in the shoes, but in the steps into the unknown and the uncertainty about which path to take? Not in the pictures, but in the conversations? Not in the conversations, but in the question marks? Not in the words, but in the pauses that breathe between them? Not in the behavior, but in the beating of the heart? Not in a face, but in a dream? Not in a being, but in the becoming?

Alice disse: As obras de Lewis Carroll e como suas histórias e personagens influenciaram o mundo

2012-01-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

Gabriela Silva do Nascimento

e Aline Marcelino de Arruda Camargo

Tinha 13 anos quando li pela primeira vez li as Alices de Lewis Carroll e, desde então, tento encontrar a toca do Coelho Branco na intenção de ir morar lá dentro do País das Maravilhas. Como, até agora, não consegui encontrar, me contento em apreciar e estudar sobre essa brilhante e eterna obra. Foi para isso que eu e minha amiga, Aline Marcelino, nos juntamos em 2011 e decidimos fazer como trabalho de conclusão do curso de jornalismo, na Faculdade Cásper Líbero, sob orientação da professora Helena Jacob, o almanaque Alice Disse: As obras de Lewis Carroll e como suas histórias e personagens influenciaram o mundo. É um tema gigantesco e um objetivo megalomaníaco, eu sei, mas a nossa intenção nunca foi dar conta de todo o universo de Alice (porque seria impossível), sim compilar informações para que as pessoas possam entender e apreciar ainda mais esse clássico da literatura ocidental, que se tornou também um símbolo da cultura pop mundial.

Todos os anos surgem novas Alice (a história) em filmes, seriados, livros, músicas, jogos de videogames, histórias em quadrinhos. E também surgem novas Alices (a personagem), sejam morenas, louras, crianças, adultas, de azul, de vermelho, de amarelo, sonhadoras, curiosas ou simplesmente malucas. Também não se pode esquecer que os livros de Lewis Carroll se tornaram figurinha fácil em produtos, como brinquedos, doces, roupas, eletrônicos, joias e qualquer outra coisa que você puder imaginar. Mas não é só em produtos, serviços, filmes, livros e outros meios da cultura pop que Alice sobrevive. No meio acadêmico, todos os anos são feitas pesquisas que relacionam a obra de Carroll com as mais diferentes áreas do conhecimento: os livros já foram estudados por matemáticos, psicólogos, lingüistas, historiadores e intelectuais do mundo inteiro. Nossa ideia foi criar um livro que desse aos seus leitores as informações mais relevantes e curiosas para, assim, o melhor entendimento e os fazer gostar ainda mais das histórias de Alice.

Depois de um interminável trabalho de pesquisa e de um doloroso processo de edição, terminamos com um almanaque dividido em três partes: a primeira conta como o mundo influenciou a obra de Lewis Carroll, mostrando de que forma a vida do autor, de sua musa Alice Liddell e os costumes da Inglaterra Vitoriana foram essenciais para a construção das histórias; a segunda é centrada nos próprios livros, e procura contar as curiosidades mais relevantes e inusitadas sobre os episódios, temas e personagens da obra; e, por fim, o almanaque faz o caminho inverso do início e mostra como a obra influenciou o mundo, examinando examinando as diferentes adaptações e inspirações do trabalho de Lewis Carroll em filmes, livros, músicas, jogos de videogame, doces, brinquedos, roupas, lojas, serviços, jóias, etc.

Procuramos colocar no almanaque desde as referências mais conhecidas (como a animação de 1951 dos estúdios Walt Disney), até aquelas que quase se perderam ao longo dos anos (como o primeiro filme adaptado da obra de Lewis Carroll, lançado em 1903). Ainda assim, a quantidade de informação encontrava era inesgotável e até entre o que consideramos mais importante, foi preciso editar ainda mais para que o livro ficasse conciso e equilibrado. No fim, acreditamos ter feito uma obra que abrange os pontos mais importantes e curiosos de toda a trajetória das Alices, desde sua concepção até sua transformação em ícone da cultura pop. Tudo diagramado na intenção de ser tão criativo e estimulante quanto os universos criados por Lewis Carroll.

Ao fim de toda a nossa jornada pelo País das Maravilhas e do outro lado do espelho, concluímos que é impossível não ficar pelo menos um pouquinho maluco depois de entrar em contato com todas as maravilhas criadas ou influenciadas por Lewis Carroll. O biógrafo Morton N. Cohen escreveu que descrever o talento de Carroll como “excepcional” é insuficiente, e isso é um motivos mais claros do porquê de Alice estar, ainda hoje, tão viva e relevante quanto na época em que foi criada: não é uma questão de imaginação ou de criatividade, mas de magia.

colagens: Paula Silva do Nascimento

Visions of Alice: the little girl at the heart of Wonderland

2011-11-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

Marina Warner

found at the guardian

No word exists for imaginary characters such as Hamlet, or Frankenstein and his Creature, who have developed autonomous life, leaping off the stage or out of a book, who add to the variety of human personalities we all know and offer us compass bearings. Of all such figments, the most recognisable must be Alice, the little girl questor at the heart of Lewis Carroll's two classic stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).

Alice in Wonderland
Tate Liverpool
Starts 4 November 2011
Until 29 January 2012
Venue website

It's perhaps surprising that an art gallery, rather than a library, is holding a huge survey exhibition about Alice, but then Carroll's creation has been and still is the inspiration of artists, photographers, theatrical designers, animators, film-makers. The new Tate Liverpool show explores this territory, from the author's own rarely seen manuscript illustrations and marvellously evocative biographical materials (Carroll's perceptive and often lyrical photographs, works of art by his pre-Raphaelite friends) to the Surrealists, for whom Alice became a cherished myth.

The Surrealist movement is represented by some of the most potent works in the exhibition: Salvador Dalí's illustrated edition of Alice, and the finest painting in Dorothea Tanning's oeuvre, the eerie Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, with sunflowers bursting colossal tentacles around the little girl with her hair on end in spikes of flame. The Surrealist legacy is still very fertile, in the context of a growing return to myth, fairytale and romanticism.

Dorothea Tanning

Alice is the prototype of wise child and naive innocent – as seen in the vision not only of such artists as Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden, but of their successors in disquiet, Annelies Štrba and Alice Anderson, practitioners of the contemporary uncanny who give a new feminist twist to the heroine. Alice has grown older and more knowing than her original model, and turned into the receptacle of erotic dreams, a femme enfant with whom women artists strongly identify: the knowledge you are Alice as strong as the longing for her.

Annelies Strba

The character of Alice was inspired by Alice Liddell, the second daughter of the growing family who came to live in the Deanery, Christ Church, the college where Charles Dodgson was a fellow. A very pretty child with a melancholy cast of feature, she became the dearest of the author's child-friends, his chief love from among a host of girls – and boys – whom he entertained with puzzles, riddles, jokes, poems, gadgets, ditties and caricatures. He had begun photographing children several years before he wrote the Alice stories. He would focus on the families of artists, inviting himself into the houses of Rossetti, Millais, Arthur Hughes, and the fantasy writer George Macdonald, in a forward way that seems at odds with the shy, stammering persona of the rather undistinguished mathematics lecturer, who was deaf in one ear, and very partial to jelly and cakes. The eccentric and miraculous creator of Alice was one of history's great refusers. Like Kafka, with whom he has more in common than usually recognised, Dodgson could never resolve himself to move to the next stage of his life: he never took holy orders, never rose in the college hierarchy, never married. He was happy only in the company of children. However, he looked after a large number of other unmarried siblings (especially after he made so much money with the Alice books), campaigned against vivisection, seems to have devised the single transferable vote, and successfully pressed to improve the living conditions of child performers.

Today, Lewis Carroll might be under surveillance and, if not in prison, tagged. His sexuality caused him "unspeakable torments", writes Carroll's assiduous biographer, Morton Cohen. Yet, as Penelope Fitzgerald pointed out, "we can consider ourselves fortunate", since his diverted sexual energy "was in all probability the source of his genius".

The first Alice story was originally called Alice's Adventures under Ground, but Carroll thought this sounded as if it might contain "instructions about mines". Elf-land was another possibility he considered, before he decided – momentously – on Wonderland. But his first idea of an underworld reveals the connection of the Alice books to forebears among dream visionaries who descended into the nether regions, such as Dante and Blake. Carroll was above all a parodist, who fired in his own kiln a great original work from the rubble of others. This member of the Anglican clergy shows very little sign of Christian faith, evincing instead a passionate up-to-the-minute engagement with nascent ideas about the unconscious, fantasy and altered states. He translated Christian eschatology into early psychological delvings into terrors and absurdity – Alice is opposed and frustrated at every turn, but she's a dissenter not a collaborationist, and keeps speaking up against the way the people and animal-characters she encounters insist on the rightness of their way of doing things. A little girl raises a voice of common sense against the arbitrary rules and unjust commandments of the grown-up world; the picture of adult repressiveness was written to cheer her up, as it has done so many readers since.

Alice Pleasance Liddell, 1968, Kent Fine Art, New York

The dream child who is also a dreamer of truths, and the Carroll vision of the folly of the world are only two of the myriad themes that have excited artists. The Tate show reveals a lineage of art works that have not been explored before: the long interest, especially in this country from the early Victorian era onwards, in graphic illustration. The future Lewis Carroll was born during the heyday of a form of British art that has been sidelined as minor for too long, and the story of Alice's rise to mythic status also belongs to this history of a great 19th-century enterprise: the picture book. Thomas Bewick, a pioneer of the form, is vividly remembered, for example, by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847). In the novel, Jane is also a little girl at the beginning and we see her happily mind-voyaging through the pages of Bewick's History of British Birds: Jane confides to us how "Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings … and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and … fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads …

"With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way."

Charles Dodgson was 15 when Brontë's novel exploded into Victorian consciousness, but he doesn't have to have known this book directly for us to imagine that he knew and even shared the heroine's feelings. When Alice thinks crossly, at the beginning of Wonderland, about her sister's reading matter, "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" she speaks as a Victorian child from a similar background as young Charles Dodgson. For a family like the Dodgsons, living far from the metropolis in not very affluent circumstances in a draughty rectory, illustrated magazines such as Punch were the principal vehicle by which pictures reached them, and they contributed a crucial element in the world that formed the creator of Alice.

As a boy, Carroll made up family miscellany magazines with lots of drawings by himself and his brother Wilfred, copied from pictures that came their way: his early attempts look like Edward Lear's cartoons, and he recycled several of the poems and jokes for the Alice books: part of "Jabberwocky", for instance, appears in one of these family magazines, Mischmasch, as a "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry", written out in pretence runes.

The author of Alice grasped intuitively the power of images to imprint themselves on the collective consciousness in the age of mechanical reproduction. For many years, he tried to make the Alice pictures himself, and their awkwardness sharpens his fantasy's quirky weirdness. The Tate show includes the original sketches Dodgson drafted – of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, and the Caterpillar, as well as the earliest version of the "Long-Tale", a pioneering "calligramme", or picture-poem, in the form of a mouse's curving tail for which Dodgson razored every typographic character individually and pasted it down. But he couldn't draw little girls of character, and it was when he realised he needed a better artist than himself and chose John Tenniel that his Alice became the universally recognisable figure she is – from the Alice band to the pinafore and the pumps. Carroll admired Tenniel for his work on the animals in Aesop's Fables in particular, but he also knew him as a Punch cartoonist and indefatigable illustrator, with the magic metamorphoses of the Arabian Nights and many other titles in his portfolio. Although Tenniel was overburdened with work, and relations with the pernickety and exacting Dodgson were often fraught, he brilliantly rendered the curiouser and curiouser world of Alice.

Before Freud formed his model of the psyche, Carroll was writing with conviction about infancy and the unconscious, which he identified with travels in fairyland in the introduction to his last book, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). His interest was shared by his generation: the same year, Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote a full account of her child self called The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child, about her dreamworld and her imaginary friends. But Carroll wrought a great difference to the Romantic legacy of fantasy about childhood imagination, and to his contemporaries' interest in internal states, because he adopted the technological and scientific structures of the new magic media: his skill as a photographer, using the extremely tricky wet collodion process, gave him the coordinates of space-time in Alice's Wonderland: she grows big and small as in a lens or developing tray, while Looking Glass country is governed by the catoptrics, the phenomena of reflection and refraction, which operate in the reflex camera.

The multiple layerings of reality that Alice passes through, growing more and more bewildered, anticipate current cyber-reality, as many extrapolations show. At the end of Wonderland, Alice's sister dreams of a future Alice telling the story of her fantastic dream to her children, and at the end of Looking Glass, Alice asks her kitten: "who it was that dreamed it all … You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!" This labyrinth with no exit shapes Jorge Luis Borges's marvellous fable, The Circular Ruins, and since then, the central concept of the Matrix films, and, more recently, of Christopher Nolan's Inception. It is this emphasis on the reality of dream life and the absurdity of conventions, combined with the modernity of his methods, that has made Carroll's dream child the vehicle for so much active dreamwork from artists such as Sigmar Polke, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper, whose interpretations give Alice a psychedelic and occult colour.

An intrinsic element in the universe of reverie is the mysterious elapsing of time, and the different temporality of stories, of daily business, of Carroll's imagination, as Gillian Beer explores in a fascinating catalogue essay. The Tate exhibition has included works that take up this aspect of the Alice story, by the conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, for example. "I wonder if I have changed in the night?" Alice muses. "Let me think, was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that's a great puzzle!" This is indeed the existential question that lies at the heart of the most recent controversial philosophy of personhood (as in Galen Strawson's latest book, and Derek Parfit's) but Carroll and artists his Alice has inspired have been exploring this unsettling question for decades.

When I was young and first read the Alice books, I found them peculiar and harsh, and felt something disturbing was going on underneath that I didn't understand. When I grew up the tantalising wit and fantasy in the stories won me over. But that current of strangeness and enigma still charges Alice's adventures and it touches a live wire in the imaginations of artists. A work by Rodney Graham in the show embodies this suggestion of secret knowledge: he has encased a vintage edition of Alice, one with a fancy pictorial binding, between two halves of a ghostly white slipcase, parted to allow a glimpse – of what? Like the White Rabbit, the sense disappears as one chases after it. As Lewis Carroll wrote of Alice:

still she haunts me phantom-wise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes

Alice beckons us to enter our own fugitive states of feeling and desire, our own elusive dreamworlds.

Alice through the lens

2011-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

John Tenniel

FOUND AT BFI

"Lewis Carroll’s heroine Alice and the Wonderland she visits have meant very different things to different artists. Mark Sinker surveys the key films –and illustrations – that brought her to life

“Well,” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

In Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005), as Jeliza-Rose sits with her junkie dad on a night bus, fleeing the scene of her mother’s OD, she is reading by torchlight from her favourite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when her dad says, “We’re not gonna be safe till we get to grandma’s house.” He is, of course, wrong about grandma’s house. In her unflappable, serious-minded, 11-year-old way, Jeliza-Rose will have to cope with more drugs, more death and the odd sex drives of some perilously feckless adults when she gets there.

She’s reading the opening chapter, ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole’. As she holds the book in her lap we see an old-style black-and-white picture: Alice falling past a cupboard, grabbing at a jar as she passes. “D’you think mom will keep falling, till she falls right through the earth?” Jeliza-Rose asks. But her dad is lost in his own upside-down world. She falls asleep, and the bus passes under a bridge into the bright new dream-space of the prairies.

The illustration is at once recognisable and strange. John Tenniel, a respected Victorian political cartoonist for Punch magazine, is by far the best-known Alice illustrator. He was brought in by Lewis Carroll when friends persuaded the author that his privately printed Alice’s Adventures under Ground (1864) was strong enough to publish, but perhaps without his own evocative but artless pictures. And it is recognisably Tenniel’s Alice that we glimpse in Tideland: her hair long, blonde and off her forehead; her clothes a frock and pinafore; white stockings and strapped Mary Janes on tiny feet; her age surely more than the seven years Wonderland'’s text demands. And, of course, there’s her frown – because while Carroll often has Alice laughing, Tenniel never does.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Courtesy Mary Evans Picture Library

Tenniel executed around 100 woodcuts for the various Victorian editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its 1872 sequel Through the Looking Glass (including a handful of later colour plates, which is how we know her frock is light blue). Nearly a century and a half later, his is the instantly recognisable Alice we see in adverts, parodies and jokes: an icon fashioned for a lasting place in our shared cultural heritage. But the image seen in Tideland confirms the strength of Tenniel’s gravitational pull, in a curious way: because, utterly familiar as it seems, the image is not by Tenniel (or if it is, it’s not canonic). After Wonderland's court-scene frontispiece, Tenniel’s first narrative image is of the White Rabbit; in his second, Alice unveils the tiny door. Almost certainly, Tideland's falling Alice is a pastiche by a successor, careful to stay within the distinctive conception and brand.

This precise conception of Alice abides despite the fact that, since the close of the 19th century, more than 50 other artists have illustrated these stories, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Peter Blake, as well as such front-rank children’s illustrators as Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake and Tove Jansson – not to mention the modern-day political cartoonist Ralph Steadman. Furthermore, at least 20 film and television versions, including silents, animation and porn, have been made, with Tim Burton’s the latest to reach our screens.

Lewis Carroll – more properly Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lecturer in mathematics and logic at Oxford, Anglican deacon but never priest, amateur photographer and conjuror – died in 1898. In the new century, Alice art emerged that tried – and largely failed – to break with the Tenniel template; the new medium of cinema, however, reaffirmed this template. Three known silent Alice films were made, in 1903, 1910 and 1915. (The damaged fragment that survives of Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 version has recently been restored by the BFI.)

The cinema was adept at phantasmagoria from the first – Georges Méliès made a dozen films in 1903 alone, featuring such Alice business as size-change and vanishings. But, perhaps awed by the book’s status as a ‘children’s classic’, the early Alice films approach their special effects shyly and stagily, with a literalist clumsiness that sits quite timidly in Tenniel’s shadow. Yet there is charm too: the poetry of abandoned technologies, as teasingly evocative of lost ideals as it is inadvertently sceptical of current identical illusions. Such poetic charm is what drew the surrealists to silent film when it ceased to be the industry norm – and, indeed, to the Victorian journalistic woodcut, and to Carroll himself. Louis Aragon and André Breton lauded Carroll, for whom nonsense, as Breton wrote in his 1939 Anthology of Black Humour, constituted “the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties… No one can deny that in Alice’s eyes a world of oversight, inconsistency and, in a word, impropriety hovers vertiginously round the centre of truth.”

In old age, Max Ernst created a sequence of Alice-themed lithographs – half spindly scribble, half geometric diagram – for Lewis Carroll’s Wunderhorn, a 1970 German edition of texts by Dodgson, including excerpts from his 1887 textbook The Game of Logic. Ernst’s earlier Une Semaine de bonté, a 1934 “novel in collage” consisting of 184 images featuring animal-people in curious encounters and spaces, was fashioned from anonymous journeyman woodcuts of similar style, feel and date to Tenniel’s illustrations. The stolidity characteristic of such figures and settings is revealed to have sedimented within them all manner of unobserved vivid energies, unleashed by the passing of time, the turn of fashion and sly surrealist juxtaposition.

Norman Z. McLeod’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland

A year before Ernst’s collage-novel, Paramount released its all-star Alice in Wonderland, with a cast including Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Edward Everett Horton and W. C. Fields – as the White Knight, the Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter and Humpty-Dumpty respectively – and 19-year-old Charlotte Henry as Alice. This too was a collage, with characters from both books, and the grisly tale of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ – and the little oysters they prey on – rendered as a cartoon sequence by the Fleischer Brothers.

As fidelity is set aside, Hollywood – by accident or design – begins to unveil what lies behind the apparent innocence of this children’s classic. Where the 1903 silent Alice features a Cheshire Cat that’s merely a plump, cross, ordinary Persian sat doing militant nothing as the grown-up playing Alice (dressed Tenniel-mode) overacts, Paramount’s Cheshire Cat, if anything, heightens the bizarre monstrosity of Tenniel’s original, its grin hideously distending its face. As this Cat vanishes, its outline becomes a bright, ghostly light in the sky, marking less a wayside character with odd properties and a snide attitude than some amusing yet sinister all-surveying deity – a deity who will eventually encourage Alice to challenge and overturn Wonderland’s ruling dynasty.

And yet this classic book is routinely treated as a quaint, almost chintzy relic of cosiness – a story that is, when you think of it, that of a very small girl alone in a world of extreme flux and chaos. In Wonderland, size, time and status are all nagging open questions. Behind the Looking Glass, Alice, the girl-pawn armed with nothing but what she can recall of her common sense, is left unprotected on a massive darkling battlefield. Social hierarchies, in the pomp of their self-confidence, are laughed away; small and large are concepts as fluid as the roles of monarch and infant. Death jokes and poems abound – the chirpy little oysters are not the only ones that end up eaten.

Suspended animation

Walt Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland

Subsequent film versions have revealed other dimensions to Carroll’s tale. In the book, it’s the arrival of the White Rabbit that signals to sleepy Alice – bored as she is by dull prose in a summery meadow – that something is up. What Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland (1951) straightaway adds is that Tenniel no longer holds sway. In place of the illustrator’s austere Rabbit (and indeed Carroll’s flustered and fussily bullying one) is a dumpy, goofy, bouncy, cutesy ninny – part Thumper-ish energy, part Geppetto-ish querulousness, and clearly modelled, voice-wise, on Tex Avery’s (and MGM’s) cartoon character Droopy.

Being a Disney film, this Alice doesn’t entirely dodge saccharine moralism. Dreaming of a world that’s all nonsense all the time, Alice is given what she wants, and thus learns to appreciate – in the exhausting pell-mell of a universe in thrall to meaninglessness – the order of governess-ruled reality. But the film’s paws are planted in the playful rigour of Disney’s own ‘Silly Symphonies’ and Warners’ ‘Merrie Melodies’, the anarchic semi-abstract shorts that made up toon-world in the 1930s and 40s. The quasi-highbrow Disney feature Fantasia (1940) was similarly episodic: as a madcap recap of this hit, Alice is also the closest Disney ever came to the frenetic screwball aesthetic of rival toon-makers MGM and Warners, and such directors as Avery and Chuck Jones.

Though it opens in an exaggeratedly tranquil Hollywood Oxford, the paint-by-numbers realism speedily explodes into knockabout impossibility. The strongest characters have control, Chuck Jones-style, over their own mise en scène (the Caterpillar, for instance, is an orientalist sultan whose hookah realises words as interrogatory letters, text-speak style: “Who RU?” “Y?”) or even over their own bodily integrity (the Cat lithely links and unlinks his own purple stripe-hoops and is, of everyone Alice encounters, the most at home in the visual and verbal anarchy). After the slow glide down past the fairground-mirror distorted shelves of the rabbit hole, and the first spasm of size-play, the ‘Pool of Tears’/‘Caucus-Race’ scene combines with the ‘Lobster Quadrille’ in a choreography of sea beasts and nautical memes. Just before the final chase scene, a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley troupe of playing cards swirls, fans and shuffles into modernist anti-figurative patterns within the palace garden maze. At the end, as Alice flees the Wonderland hordes, they seem to be coming for her out of the same vortex that constitutes the ‘Looney Tunes’ iris-out tunnel. Except this time there’s no baby-faced Porky Pig to declare “Th-th-that’s all folks!”

Jonathan Miller’s 1966 Alice in Wonderland

A cartoon, of course, can achieve a profusion of irreality beyond the black-and-white means of British television in the mid-1960s. Jonathan Miller’s response, in his 1966 BBC version, is to make an inspired virtue of such limitations. Over the drifting fly-buzz of Ravi Shankar’s sitar, which suffuses a very English landscape with the flavour of the lost Raj, Miller takes the eventless dullness of Alice’s waking world and imports it into her dream, amplifying everything strange about the mundane real. Except for the Cat (very vocal, rarely visible), the animal characters in this version are played as and by humans, a cross-section of British serio-comic character acting at its mid-60s zenith: a rabbity Wilfrid Brambell, a mousy Alan Bennett, Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar, Peter Cook as the Hatter. Size-shifts are simple jump cuts; the pool of tears is a slow-motion cutaway in variant granularity. The irreal is unimportant to Miller, whose interest is social psychology.

Alice is a 14-year-old non-actress, Anne-Marie Mallick, in her only screen role, and she emanates an imperious, baffled, resentful boredom at the stupidity of the grown-up world she’s enduring: Wonderland here is less an escape from lingering Empire memories than a distillation of them. Not the military or economic engine room of colonialism, but its backstage spaces: its corridors, kitchens, libraries, potting sheds, its tea parties and croquet meets. Food is piled high; time stands still. Here are large, elegant gardens that can hardly cultivate themselves, spacious houses full of decorative bric-a-brac, Victoriana as the already dusty museum of itself – a realm of effortless material accumulation, the means of its acquisition and maintenance rendered as invisible as the Cat.

The portal this time is not visual but aural: Shankar’s sitar, Cook’s strangled, self-abnegating obsessive-compulsive terror as the Hatter, and above all – in the most heartbreaking sequence in Miller’s film – John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle. In languid melancholy and unworded lament, Gielgud’s Turtle speaks and sings to that dimension of Empire which is not unalloyed robbery with menaces, but at the same time a vast project of busy practical idealism, a rebuilding of all the fallen world in the muscular, problem-solving self-image of the British of a certain era – their confidence, their anxiety, their awareness and denial of failure and contradiction.

This mock beast named for a fake food – paired with a Gryphon played by that puckish moral humbug, Malcolm Muggeridge – invokes his beloved teacher, a turtle they called Tortoise, and all that institutional web of high-ranking schools and great teachers that held together the grand global scatter of red-stained conquests. And then these two already elderly-seeming British gentleman, Gielgud and Muggeridge, dance, stepping out a child’s idea of a formal dance – the ‘Lobster Quadrille’ – while silhouetted on the beach against the whitening sky, the haughty girl walking in their midst. “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?” An invitation to established society’s ball, accepted or declined – and it’s impossible to know which the more desolate choice will be.

Oxford days

Gavin Millar’s 1985 Dreamchild

The Alice tales began at a boating picnic on 4 July 1862, as improvised by Dodgson to entertain the three daughters of his colleague Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church. Dreamchild (1985) is set both in that Oxford summer and in New York, 1932, where Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell), now an ailing widow of 80, is accepting an honorary degree from Columbia University on Dodgson’s behalf, to mark the centenary of his birth. Scripted by Dennis Potter and directed by Gavin Millar, this sweetly made film is a fictionalised elaboration of a historical event. Made in a decade when adult predation on the young was exploding as a topic of public fright, it’s an anti-romantic romance that challenges cynical expectation, burrowing down into the sugar of emotional truth that wised-up modern truism can miss.

Mrs Hargreaves’ teenage maid Lucy falls for Jack Dolan, a semi-scrupulous New York journalist who romances her to get access to this elderly muse of Carroll’s legendary books. A “most fraudulent young man”, the amused widow calls the plausible Dolan, and there’s a very Potterish pleasure in discerning, behind frailty and bewilderment, the common-sense spark of the girl who beguiled Dodgson 70 years before. “It’s not cheap music that’s disturbing you, it’s your youth,” she tells her maid. (The power of cheap crooner tea-jazz is Potter’s signature, of course.)

Against the disenchanted present-day conception of Lewis Carroll – as shy, virgin bachelor with a creepy thing for small girls – Potter sets the proposal that adults, however hag-ridden, can be both wiser and nicer than children; he also reveals a scepticism towards sex as the trumping value, and a renewed quasi-Victorian trust in the generous kindness of agenda-less friendship. We’re suspicious of this last because, as self-proclaimed masters of all fleshly wisdom, it is something we envy enormously.

As the ceremony nears, Mrs Hargreaves is troubled by phantasms from her past: her family broke off relations with Dodgson, but she can’t recall why. Is there something terrible that she knows but cannot face? In the form of Jim Henson’s puppets, Carroll’s characters – Caterpillar, Gryphon, Mock Turtle, the Mad Tea Party threesome – rise into her waking dreams not as cheeky little Muppets but as demons, hairy, hulking, ugly and threatening. At the tea party in particular, Hare and Hatter – feral and corpse-like – torture the Dormouse with boiling tea and bully Alice about who she is and should be. This nightmare colours the remembrance of another picnic long ago: the follow-up boat trip when young Alice transferred her affections from Dodgson (Ian Holm) on to her future husband, Hargreaves. As Dodgson reads ‘The Lobster Quadrille’, Alice, embarrassed in the presence of her spotty young suitor, expresses boredom, and the two snigger at Dodgson’s speech defect. Little Alice, we realise, was spiteful and self-involved, manipulative and shallow. The crimes the old woman fears facing were not Dodgson’s odd desires, but her own thoughtless cruelties.

As the moment of her acceptance speech arrives, there’s one last flashback. First, as a mortified Dodgson falls silent, Alice’s older sister takes the book and finishes the poem. Then Alice comes over to hug the writer. It’s left ambiguous if this resolution is genuine memory or consoling fiction. Merited or not, ancient Alice is forgiving herself.

Going underground

Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 Alice

When Disney reinterprets Carroll’s bestiary of fabulous portmanteau mini-monsters, it’s a Tex Avery-style parade of diverting, cute, instantly forgotten cartoon gags. In Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion Alice (Neko z Alenky, 1988), his first full-length feature, you’re aware from the start that some Wonderlanders go without. This dank and meagre place – a labyrinth of shabby and claustrophobic Prague tenements, cellars and tunnels – speaks of hardship as well as decay. The stuff of life has its own nasty half-life: eggs break open to let loose scurrying chicken skulls; loaves sprout nails; raw meat slithers lubriciously. The crook-toothed White Rabbit hauls himself from a taxidermist’s vitrine and tugs his watch out of a sawdust-leaking chest cavity; the animals that come to his aid are mismatched bone beasts, all snapping jaws and bug eyes, dragging themselves clumsily in crowds after Alice.

Svankmajer economises with the characters. Hatter, Hare and Caterpillar are here only in very reduced circumstances: the first two in a corridor, in an endless clockwork cycle of tea and card-play, the last as a parasitic sock-worm with dentures, boring holes in his own flooring. The court is articulated pasteboard of a dour, home-painted kind, seeming to merge into the toy-theatre stage flats. Tellingly, Carroll’s two most bolshy characters, Gryphon and Cat, are absent.

Kristyna Kohoutová’s Alice is plainly, for once, a child not a teenager – and just as evidently an outsider. Her reaction shots are often close-ups on her frightened, fascinated eyes. She voices all the dialogue and narration, and frequently calls “Plee-ease! Si-ir!” after the Rabbit as he hurries away – a vain, petty, panicky semi-domesticated functionary in a fatuous, hysterical regime. As in Disney, it’s her own trial she arrives at, rather than that of the Knave of Hearts: a travesty of a procedure that includes a pre-scripted confession.

Made the year before the Berlin Wall came down, Svankmajer’s Alice is easy to read in straightforwardly refusenik terms: an absurdist regime about to be overthrown by the disenchanted young. Though of course there’s also a solidly semi-detached Czech continuum of sensibility here, harking back not just to Kafka, but to the dawn of Czech film surrealism, with Ladislaw Starewicz’s stop-motion folk tales from the 1910s, all animal skeletons and dead insects.

Louis Aragon declared that – in the imperial age of the Irish Famine, exploitative industrialisation and so-called free trade – human freedom itself “rested entirely in the frail hands of Alice”. But Breton, quoting this in his Anthology, bridled a little: to read Carroll as political satire, he insisted, was to misread him. “It is pure and simple deceit,” he wrote, “to suggest that the substitution of one regime for another could put an end to this kind of need.” The child will always be in revolt, he argued, against the governess.

As Svankmajer’s Alice herself puts it, before the opening credits: “A film for children. PERHAPS!”

Back to reality

Terry Gilliam’s 2005 Tideland

Let’s go back for a moment to that Tideland image – and two more ways in which it is Tenniel’s, even if it isn’t. There’s the matted darkness of the cross-hatching, a favoured technique that gives broodingly gothic body to the woodcut’s meticulous realism; and – not unrelated, and perhaps Tenniel’s most criticised quality – there’s the sense that the picture is a static tableau. Here’s a child hurtling down towards she knows not what – yet the image has a sense of floating, almost stately grace; her crossness is puzzlement rather than fear.

In many of Tenniel’s canonic Alice images, the main actors look as if they have been invited back to re-enact a frantic moment as a posed still – which is very effective for the allegorical political satire he was concerned with at Punch, but oddly mannerist and stylised for work directed at children. Tenniel can be charming, comical, stately, even nightmarish (Carroll nixed his Jabberwocky picture as a frontispiece for just this reason), but he really only achieves a sense of chaotic flux at the close of Through the Looking Glass, as Alice seizes the tablecloth and whirls everything to ruin, candles explode into shooting stars, cutlery coalesces into attack birds, and the feast itself rises up like a liberated, maddened zoo.

Though author and illustrator worked hard to marry images with text, Carroll was finicky and demanding, and never entirely reconciled to Tenniel’s approach. These were two shy, strong-willed artists, and Tenniel very nearly didn’t do Looking Glass – there was hesitation on both sides. Perhaps here lies the secret of the original work’s strength: there’s something about the unease of their collaboration, their silently truculent combination, that helps embed the conflict that’s so often implied, so rarely overtly manifested. Without the conservative, stately gravitas of Tenniel’s images, Carroll’s imagined spaces would present a terrifying instability: spaces where all relationships – in time, space, logic, nature and society – are undermined. But together, look and story made a book that could unite surrealists and Disney alike in admiration and imitation. It’s as if Tenniel’s images – the formally posed surfaces of his tableaux – mask what’s so unsettling in Carroll’s unhurried, gentle, clear, permanently amused prose, while simultaneously preserving it.

If the stillness of a Victorian woodcut merely postpones the moment at which the awful truth of falling bursts back out of an idea, what is it that films – which can easily depict shocking change and chaotic motion – bring to Alice? Disney revels in the playful exuberance of market culture in a golden age, turning the story into a dance – a masque, even – of people and animals as semi-abstract objects. Jonathan Miller explores how boredom and joy, triumph and melancholy, power and emptiness, lock into one another. It’s the tangle of projection, monstrous memory and impertinent desire in these most innocent relationships which fascinates Gavin Millar and Dennis Potter. And Svankmajer digs down – by means of Carroll’s own linguistic pranks and logical conundrums – beneath the foundations of his immediate social context to undermine everyone’s foundations, even yours. (“Why?” said the Caterpillar.)

In the awful moment in Wonderland when the Queen of Hearts discovers Alice in the garden and screams, “Off with her head!”, Alice replies: “Nonsense!” It’s a naming: reason’s stance against barbarism, calling out the system in its horrid absurdity. But it’s also a spell: all it takes is a little girl’s words, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”, and reality transforms utterly, restoring order, justice, even size – and one small child as ruler of all. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” There’s plenty left in this strange tale."

FOUND AT BFI

DRINK ME: Guinness in Wonderland

2011-08-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

read more about More Guinness Carrolling at Alice in the internet

NEW BOOK:

2011-07-27T13:42:00.001-07:00

A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered

"Martin Gardner, the "Mathematical Games" columnist for Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, was also a philosopher, polymath, magician, religious thinker, and the author of more than 70 books, including The Annotated Alice, The Ambidextrous Universe, and Visitors from Oz. Here his life and works are celebrated in a bouquet of essays about him or in his honor. Introduced by his son Jim, the book includes reminiscences by Douglas Hofstadter, Morton N. Cohen, Scott Kim, David Singmaster, Michael Patrick Hearn, and many others; a festschrift contains essays by such writers as Raymond Smullyan and Robin Wilson. This volume also contains the final annotations Gardner made to the Alice books post-"Definitive Edition," and a definitive bibliography of his Carroll-related writings. While put together under the aegis of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, it takes a far broader look at this remarkable man and his many interests and accomplishments."

Mark Burstein (editor)

Buy at Amazon

Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath,

Dies at 95

By Douglas Martin
Published: May 23, 2010

The New York Times

(not from this book)

" (...) Mr. Gardner also wrote fiction, poetry, literary and film criticism, as well as puzzle books. He was a leading voice in refuting pseudoscientific theories, from ESP to flying saucers. He was so prolific and wide-ranging in his interests that critics speculated that there just had to be more than one of him.

His mathematical writings intrigued a generation of mathematicians, but he never took a college math course. If it seemed the only thing this polymath could not do was play music on a saw, rest assured that he could, and quite well.

“Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist. (...)

Continues

Table of Contents
Foreword, by Jim Gardner
Introduction, by Mark Burstein

I. In Memoriam
Martin Gardner and the Grown-Ups, by Will Brooker
My Pen Pal, Martin Gardner, by Angelica Carpenter
Martin Gardner: Ave Atque Vale, by Morton N. Cohen
Martin Gardner, an Appreciation, by Selwyn Goodacre
Perhaps a Few Wise Words: A Tribute to Gartin Mardner, by Edward Guiliano
The Annotated Martin Gardner, by Peter Hanff
Dr. Matrix in Oz, by Michael Patrick Hearn
Martin Gardner, Major Shaping Force in My Life, by Douglas Hofstadter
The Stanford Papers, by Stanley S. Isaacs
Martin Gardner: Through the Looking-Glass, by Scott Kim
Martin Gardner and Annotation, by Jim Kincaid
All in a Golden Afternoon, by Charlie Lovett
Gardner in Japan, by Yoshiyuki Momma
Martin Gardner and Lewis Carroll: The Magical Connection, by Christopher Morgan
Gardner in the U.K., by Mark Richards
Memories of Martin, by David Schaefer
Martin Gardner: A Personal Reminiscence, by Justin Schiller
A Remembrance of a Gracious Carrollian, by Byron Sewell
Annotations of Immortality, by Brian Sibley
In the Garden of the Snark, by Mahendra Singh
Reminiscences, by David Singmaster
A Day in Norman, by Alan Tannenbaum
My Correspondence with Martin Gardner, by Edward Wakeling
Editing Martin, by Bob Weil

II. From the Knight Letter
Well, You Know, by Martin Gardner
The Final Annotations, by Martin Gardner

III. Festschrift
A Triad of Mathematics Popularizers: Martin Gardner, Richard Proctor, and Charles Dodgson,by Fran Abeles
One More Class: Martin Gardner and Logic Diagrams, by Amirouche Moktefi and A. W. F. Edwards
Probability Paradoxes, by Eugene Seneta
Four Puzzles for Martin, by Raymond Smullyan
Charles Dodgson’s Geometry, by Robin Wilson

IV. Reference
A Carrollian Bibliography, by August A. Imholtz, Jr.

Buy at AMAZON

ALICE: EDIÇÃO COMENTADA
Tradução de Maria Luiza de X. Borges.
Introdução e notas de Martin Gardner.
Ilustrações originais de John Tenniel (Inglaterra).
Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2002.

Compre na livraria cultura

"In addition to its clarifying references in Victorian England when the Alice books were written, it is interesting to observe the number of notes in Annotated Alice that link Alice to the twentieth century: James Joyce, philosophy of language, and virtual reality are some examples. Gardner shows Alice as hypertext, cross-referencing several different areas of knowledge. The text breaks out of its frames and makes conversation with other writings and historical contexts, which open up new possibilities to ways of reading the text. Alice reveals a maze. To read it is to travel along different paths." Adriana Peliano

“Aventuras de Alice no País das Maravilhas' e 'Através do Espelho', obras que divertem, intrigam e educam crianças e adultos há mais de um século, encontram nesta edição comentada sua versão definitiva. As notas de Martin Gardner - esclarecendo artifícios literários, estruturas narrativas e explicando trocadilhos de época, enigmas lógicos ou mesmo as alusões à vida pessoal do autor - dão sentido a passagens não esclarecidas nas traduções até então disponíveis em português. Uma revolução nas interpretações das histórias de Alice, proporcionando ao leitor do século XXI o instrumento perfeito para penetrar no País das Maravilhas e no mundo invertido do Espelho! O livro traz ainda - todas as ilustrações originais de John Tenniel, além de esboços recém-descobertos ; introdução situando Alice no País das Maravilhas e Através do Espelho no contexto da Inglaterra vitoriana ; bibliografia da obra de Lewis Carroll, enriquecida com edições em português; filmografia, com todos os filmes já produzidos sobre Alice; episódio inédito de 'Através do Espelho - O Marimbondo de Peruca”. Site da Editora

Penso que além trazer a tona as referências da Inglaterra Vitoriana quando os livros de Alice foram escritos, é interessante perceber o número de notas em "Alice comentada" que apontam conexões de Alice com o século XX. James Joyce, filosofia da linguagem, realidade virtual, universo em expansão são alguns exemplos. Gardner mostra Alice como um grande hipertexto, cruzado por múltiplas referências em diferentes áreas do conhecimento. O texto atravessa suas molduras e conversa com outros textos e o contexto histórico, que ao se transformar, abre novas possibilidades de leitura. Alice revela um labirinto. Ler é percorrer diferentes caminhos.

Studying dreams

2011-06-17T14:35:00.001-07:00

adriana peliano

This was one of the authors Carroll used to read studying about the importance of dreams.

read HERE

Few fragments about the interest of Carroll in dreams.

Lewis Carroll's migraine experiences

2011-05-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Klaus Podoll (a)

Derek Robinson (b)

The term “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” was coined to account for certain hallucinations peculiar to migraine,(1), (2) and the name comes, of course, from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871). Moreover, since Carroll suffered from migraine, Lippman1 suggested that he had used his own migraine experiences as a source of inspiration for his two books, so it was said that “Alice trod the path of a wonderland well known to her creator”. (2)

This thesis was refuted (3) on the grounds that migraine attacks were not mentioned in Carroll's diaries before 1885, when he noted having “experienced, for the second time, that odd optical affection of seeing moving fortifications, followed by a head-ache”, (4) the implied “first time” of this visual experience having occurred at an earlier, unknown date. Between 1885 and 1891, a total of five episodes with moving “fortifications” were recorded in the diaries (4) with only the first episode having been accompanied by headache, which strongly suggests a migraine aura without headache as the predominant form of migraine paroxysm in Carroll's experience.

Frontispiece of Lewis Carroll's 'Mischmasch' (1855-1862).

Negative scotoma drawn by a migraine sufferer from Garcin and Halbron (1934).

Two pieces of evidence, a drawing and a diary entry, which previously escaped notice, suggest that Carroll had already experienced visual migraine aura symptoms before the conception of his first Alice book, which was created in an oral version in 1862, produced in a hand-written version, Alice's Adventures Underground, in 1864, and finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. The figure shows the frontispiece of Carroll's family magazine Mischmasch, (5) compiled between 1855 and 1862, which depicts figures already shown in his previous family journal The Rectory Umbrella (1854—55). In the carefully executed drawing of the standing man, parts of the head, shoulder, wrist, and hand are missing on the right side of the picture, the rounded border of the defect being similar to that seen in a negative scotoma.

In a diary entry from Jan 12, 1856, Carroll noted: “Consulted Mr Bowman, the oculist, about my right eye: he does not seem to think anything can be done to remedy it, but recommends me not to read long at a time, nor at the railway, and to keep to large type by candlelight” (4) We believe it likely that Carroll's complaint about his right eye, which prompted him, in 1856, to seek medical advice from William Bowman, one of the most eminent ophthalmologists of his time, referred to a right-sided paracentral negative scotoma, as depicted in his frontispiece drawing from Mischmasch, the compilation of which he began in 1855. The nature of Bowman's medical advice suggests he suspected a functional disturbance due to the eye strain, resulting from reading an excessive amount or under adverse conditions. Considering Bowman's apparent failure in 1856 to achieve a more definite diagnosis for Carroll's visual complaints, it has to be taken into account that, despite the existence of some earlier reports in the literature, the visual manifestations of migraine did not attain a more widespread recognition in the medical profession before the 1870s.

Since Carroll suffered from migraine aura symptoms before writing the Alice books, the thesis that at least some of Alice's adventures were based on Carroll's personal migraine aura perceptions gains further support. This thesis would explain the otherwise inexplicable similarities between the experiences described in the two Alice books and the semeiology of migraine aura symptoms both in the visual and somesthetic domain.

This research was funded by a grant from the START programme of the Medical Faculty of the University of Technology, Aachen.

collage by Adriana Peliano

References

1 Lippman CW. Certain hallucinations peculiar to migraine. J New Ment Dis 1952; 116: 346-351. PubMed
2 Todd J. The syndrome of Alice in Wonderland. Can Med Assoc J 1955; 73: 701-704. PubMed
3 Blau JN. Somesthetic aura: the experience of “Alice in Wonderland”. Lancet 1998; 352: 582. Full Text | PDF(18KB) | CrossRef | PubMed
4 In: Green RL, ed. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. London: Cassell & Co, 1953.
5 Carroll L. Das literarische Gesamtwerk. Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1998.

(a) Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Technology, D-52074 Aachen, Germany; and 2 Laxton Green, Cox Green, Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK
(b) Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Technology, D-52074 Aachen, Germany

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

2011-04-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

Found at BBC home HERE

"Have you ever gone to bed, perhaps feeling a little under the weather, and, just as you start to fall asleep, had the sensation that you were growing taller, or shrinking? Or that your body was floating away, or sinking down into your bed? If so, you have experienced a mild 'Alice in Wonderland' symptom.

Manuhell

What are the Symptoms?

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is a neurological condition associated with migraine. The symptoms are the result of cells in the brain firing inappropriately, giving rise to unusual perceptions and experiences. It can occur with, or without painful headache or abdominal symptoms. Many people who experience AIWS are not aware of having migraine at all. They may experience symptoms daily – sometimes several times a day – or less frequently.

People experiencing episodes of AIWS report:

Visual distortions. Things seem to be bigger or smaller than usual, or to be closer, or further away.
Distortions of time. Events speed up or slow down.
Distortions of their own bodies. They feel their head is growing, or they feel their body has shrunk or elongated.
Balance problems. They may feel that they are standing at an angle, or that they are spinning. This can result in nausea.
Auditory distortions. Sounds seem loud. Voices sound aggressive or tremulous, or to be coming from a long way away.
Specific tastes or smells.
Distortions in perception of texture. Bedclothes may feel like stone. The floor may feel spongy.
Emotional experiences. They may feel inexplicably frightened, or that someone is watching them.
Other symptoms are very complex, and less common. They may involve hallucinations of solid objects or visits to unknown places, hearing voices, feelings of unreality, hearing long passages of music or experiencing the presence of a visible or invisible 'alter ego'.

Small wonder, then, that most people who experience these symptoms are afraid to mention them, for fear of being labelled mentally ill!

Who First Described It?

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome was first described by John Todd in 1955. Sometimes it is referred to as 'Todd's Syndrome', not to be confused with 'Todd's paralysis' which is a partial paralysis following an epileptic seizure, and entirely unrelated to AIWS. Todd was a psychiatrist working in Yorkshire. He interviewed several patients with bizarre symptoms, none of whom had other conditions that cause similar symptoms – brain tumours, alcoholism or drug abuse, for example. None were mentally ill, in that they did not confuse the hallucinations with reality, and were able to think clearly and rationally. All had a family history of migraine. He concluded that these people were experiencing a migraine or epileptic 'aura'. Currently, AIWS has been associated with migraine, rather than with epilepsy.

Todd named his syndrome after Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland', (1865) because of the similarity between some of the common AIWS symptoms and a part of Alice's story. Alice drinks a mysterious liquid labelled with the words 'Drink me' and shrinks until she is small enough to fit through a tiny door and enter a very small room. She then eats a cake, labelled 'Eat me' and grows so tall her head hits the ceiling. This 'body dysmorphia' is one of the most common symptoms of AIWS. People experiencing AIWS feel that parts of their bodies are elongating, shrinking or even disappearing into the floor. Carroll suffered from migraine, and it has been speculated that his stories arose from strange experiences he had during his migraine auras.

What is its Effect?

AIWS seems to affect children and younger adults, and often disappears or at least becomes less intrusive in mature adults. It seems to be at its worst in the teens and early twenties. Doctors report that women seem more affected than men, but acknowledge that this may be because women visit their doctor for advice more readily than men do.

How much AIWS affects a person's life depends on severity and frequency of symptoms; some people have only a few episodes in their lives, or experience episodes only at night, whilst others may have episodes which occur several times a day, every day. People with mild and infrequent symptoms can get on with their lives with little difficulty, apart from a mild curiosity about the odd experiences they sometimes have! People with more severe symptoms may be unable to drive or operate machinery, due to visual distortion and hallucinations, leading to difficulties in employment. Children affected in school may find it hard to concentrate, and noisy classrooms and playgrounds may over-stimulate them. Children or adults with severe, undiagnosed symptoms may feel anxious, experience panic attacks and suffer from low self esteem. In addition, the burden of their secret 'madness' may isolate them socially. Of course, some AIWS people have a double whammy, and experience the violent headaches and/or nausea and stomach cramps of migraine too.

Although AIWS was first described over fifty years ago, the condition is still not widely known, even to doctors. Part of the problem is a lack of reporting. The symptoms appear so much like the symptoms of better-known mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and drug-related psychosis that adults are reluctant to go to their doctors for fear of being told that they are 'going crazy'. Symptoms are hard to describe, and children who experience the first onset of AIWS lack the vocabulary to explain what is happening to them. Oddly, children who experience AIWS hallucinations often don't feel as frightened by them as one might expect, and may not mention them to adults.

Treatment

AIWS has been found to respond in some cases to various anti-epilepsy and anti-migraine treatments, and also to beta blockers. However, specific drug therapy has not yet been identified. AIWS and migraine are both stress related, so management of the condition is based on management of stress, and the learning of self-help techniques. Often people with AIWS find out for themselves what works for them. When experiencing symptoms, they may want to find a quiet, safe place where they can be alone and calm themselves. Headphones may help to block out sounds which have become too loud. Darkness may make the symptoms worse, but the person may want to cover their head or eyes. Voices may sound aggressive and distress the person, so whispering or silence may be helpful. Living a healthy lifestyle, avoiding tiredness, dehydration and stress may help to reduce symptoms.

An occupational therapist may be able to work with a person with AIWS to find ways to adapt the school or work environment to their needs – but they would need a crash course in AIWS first! Most medical and paramedical professionals have never come across it before. Teachers and employers, equally, have no knowledge of the condition, and need briefing in order to be able to accommodate someone experiencing symptoms. Legally, schools and employers must make provision for people with disabilities – but AIWS isn't a widely recognised disability, so you are relying on their goodwill.

Occurrence

Neurologists speculate that AIWS is far more common than we realise. They guess that most people with mild to moderate symptoms don't talk about them, and find ways to manage them without assistance. Only when symptoms interfere with school, work or relationships do the people experiencing them, or their parents, approach doctors for advice.

Someone you know may have AIWS. You may have AIWS. If you have read this article and thought 'That sounds like me' or 'I remember having something like that when I was a child' or 'Maybe that's what my daughter means when she says that she has "big-small" dreams', stand up and be counted! Not enough is known about this condition, and undiagnosed symptoms may be blighting many lives unnecessarily. Go to your GP and get a diagnosis, and if your diagnosis is AIWS, get in touch with others via the AIWS Group.

Anything you can share about your experiences, coping strategies or life story might help other people with AIWS. We are our own research project.

References and Links

Carroll, Lewis (1865) 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'.
Todd J (1955) 'Alice in Wonderland (AIW) syndrome'. Can Med. Assoc J 73: 701-704.
Common migraine auras.
A vivid description of AIWS and its effect on the life of an adult, written for the Guardian newspaper by Rik Hemsley (2008)
Rik Hemsley's AIWS Site.

Many thanks to Rik Hemsley for technical information, inspiration and support."

Image and 42 facts by Edward Wakeling

2011-04-07T20:52:00.001-07:00

Lewis Carroll

1. Born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire.

2. Eldest son and third child of the Rev. Charles Dodgson and his wife, Frances Jane née Lutwidge.

3. Seven sisters (Frances, Elizabeth, Caroline, Mary, Margaret, Louisa, and Henrietta) and three brothers (Skeffington, Wilfred, and Edwin).

4. Educated at home by his parents – showed ability in mathematics.

5. Family moved to Croft–on–Tees, Yorkshire in 1843 when his father became rector there.

6. Went to school at Richmond, Yorkshire, when he was 12 years old.

7. Transferred to Rugby School in 1846 and studied there for four years.

8. Gained a place at Oxford University in 1850.

9. Took up his place in January 1851 as an undergraduate at Christ Church.

10. His mother died suddenly within a few days of his arrival at Christ Church.

11. Graduated with a BA degree in 1854; 1st class in Mathematics, 3rd in Classics.

12. Became a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church; appointed Sub–Librarian in 1855.

13. Appointed Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church in 1855, but takes up the post at the beginning on 1856.

14. Took the pen–name “Lewis Carroll” (based on a Latinate form of his first names) in February 1856.

15. Became a keen amateur photographer in 1856.

16. Ordained deacon in the Church of England in December 1861.

17. The story of Alice’s Adventures first told on a river trip with Alice Liddell and her sisters on 4 July 1862.

18. The manuscript of Alice’s Adventures given to Alice Liddell as a Christmas gift in 1864.

19. The book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865.

20. Took a trip across Europe to Russia in 1867; his only trip abroad.

21. His father died in 1868; he assumed the role of “head of the family” as the eldest son.

22. Leased a home at Guildford for his brothers and sisters.

23. Published his first book of poems, Phantasmagoria, in 1869.

24. Through the Looking–Glass published in 1871.

25. Continued to write mathematical works for the undergraduates at Oxford University.

26. Published an epic nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, in 1876.

27. Rented accommodation at Eastbourne for the summer holidays in 1877, and continued this practice for the rest of his life.

28. Invented many word games and mathematical puzzles.

29. Published the drama, Euclid and His Modern Rivals, in 1879, but it was never performed as a play in his lifetime.

30. He gave up his photographic hobby in July 1880 and took no more photographs.

31. Resigned the Mathematical Lectureship at Christ Church in 1881, but remained in residence as a senior member of the college.

32. Elected Curator of the Common Room in 1882 by his colleagues.

33. Further poetry published under the title Rhyme? and Reason? in 1883.

34. A series of mathematical problems woven around a story published at A Tangled Tale in 1885.

35. The original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures published in facsimile in 1886, all proceeds going to hospitals and children’s homes.

36. The Game of Logic published in 1887 to support his teaching of the subject in schools and colleges.

37. The first part of a new story book, Sylvie and Bruno, published in 1889.

38. A special version of Alice for very young children, called The Nursery “Alice”, was written in 1889.

39. The second part of the new story, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, published in 1893.

40. His major work on logic, Symbolic Logic, Part 1: Elementary, was published in 1896; two further volumes were planned but not published in his lifetime.

41. He died at Guildford on 14 January 1898 and is buried there.

42. The copyright of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ended in 1907 and many editions have been published since them, the book never going out of print. It has also been translated into many different languages.

Alice Liddell

1. Born on 4 May 1852 at Westminster School, London, and christened “Alice Pleasance Liddell” in Westminster Abbey by her father.

2. Fourth child and second daughter of the Rev. Henry George Liddell and Lorina Hannah née Reeve.

3. Five brothers (Edward Henry–known as Harry, James Arthur Charles–died in infancy, Albert Edward Arthur–died in infancy, Frederick Francis, Lionel Charles) and four sisters (Lorina Charlotte, Edith Mary, Rhoda Caroline Anne, Violet Constance).

4. Father was headmaster of Westminster School from 1846–1855.

5. In June 1855, Alice’s father was appointed Dean of Christ Church, and the family moved to the Deanery in early 1856.

6. Lewis Carroll first met Alice (then aged nearly four) when he was photographing the Cathedral at Christ Church in April 1856.

7. Lewis Carroll took many photographs of Alice (one given above) and her siblings, Harry, Lorina and Edith. Alice was educated at home.

8. She was particularly good at English, French and art.

9. Her governess was Miss Mary Prickett, known by Alice as “Pricks”.

10. Alice had short dark straight hair cut into a fringe.

11. Reports say she had blue eyes, although her passport described them as “dark”.

12. Lewis Carroll often visited the Deanery and entertained the Liddell children, especially when the Dean and his wife were abroad for the sake of the Dean’s health.

13. Lewis Carroll taught them to play croquet, and also a special version of the game that he invented called “Castle Croquet”.

14. Lewis Carroll invented a card game called “Ways and Means” that he played with the Liddell children.

15. On 4 July 1862, Lewis Carroll took Alice, her two sisters Lorina and Edith, together with Rev. Robinson Duckworth, on a boat trip up the River Isis (Thames) to Godstow.

16. The story of Alice’s Adventures was first told on this river trip.

17. At Alice’s request, Lewis Carroll wrote out the story he had invented, which he called “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”.

18. Lewis Carroll wrote out the story from memory in his own neat hand; it took him several months to do so.

19. He also drew pictures to illustrated the story.

20. The manuscript of Alice’s Adventures was given to Alice Liddell as an early Christmas gift in 1864.

21. Friends of Lewis Carroll who had seen or heard the story beforehand strongly advised him to publish it.

22. Lewis Carroll re–wrote the story for publication, adding new episodes such as the Mad Tea–Party.

23. The book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was first published in July 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel.

24. Tenniel was not satisfied with the printing of the first edition, and it was withdrawn.

25. The book was re–printed and published in December 1865, although these copies have 1866 on the title page.

26. The book has never been out–of–print from then onwards.

27. In Alice’s Adventures, Alice’s sister Lorina is the “Lory” in the “Pool of Tears”.

28. In Alice’s Adventures, Alice’s sister Edith is the “Eaglet” in the “Pool of Tears”.

29. All three sisters appear in the Dormouse’s tale at the “Mad Tea–Party” as the three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a well, named Elsie (L. C. or Lorina Charlotte), Lacie (anagram of Alice), and Tillie (short for Matilda, the children’s pet–name for Edith).

30. Robinson Duckworth was the “Duck” in the “Pool of Tears”.

31. Lewis Carroll’s own adopted character was the “Dodo”.

32. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited Christ Church in 1863, and this event became a feature of the sequel, Through the Looking–Glass.

33. Through the Looking–Glass was published in late 1871, but all copies of the first edition have 1872 on the title page.

34. At the end of Through the Looking Glass there is a poem, the first letter of each line spells out Alice’s name.

35. When Alice was a little older she was, for a time, romantically linked with Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold.

36. Alice married Reginald Hargreaves on 15 September 1880 at Westminster Abbey. She wore a brooch from Prince Leopold on her wedding–dress. They lived at “Cuffnells,” a large country house at Lyndhurst in the New Forest, Hampshire.

37. Alice had three sons; Alan, Leopold – known as Rex, and Caryl; Alan and Rex were both killed during the First World War.

38. Alice sold her manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground at auction in 1928, for which she received £15,400 (a very high price for a literary manuscript in those days).

39. Alice travelled to the United States of America in 1932, the centenary of Lewis Carroll’s birth, in order to support an exhibition at Columbia University, New York. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate of literature while she was there.

40. Alice died at Westerham, Kent, on 15 November 1934, aged 82; her ashes were buried at Lyndhurst in the Hargreaves family tomb

41. The manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, went to the USA after being sold at auction, but was presented to the British nation by a group of American benefactors in 1946, and it is now in the British Library.

Find me HERE

Ask anyone what color Alice’s dress is...

2011-04-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Am I Blue?

Above, left: The Nursery Alice, 1890

Above, right: De La Rue card game, 1894

Left: The Wonderland Postage- Stamp Case, 1889

Ask anyone what color Alice’s dress is and they’ll undoubtedly reply, “Why, blue, of course.” Unless you happen to be talking to a Carrollian who knows that the only authorized color edition, The Nursery Alice in 1890, which was colored by Tenniel and featured a cover by E. Gertrude Thomson, depicts her wearing a corn yellow frock throughout, though the apron is trimmed with blue and sports a large blue bow. The equally authorized Wonderland Postage-stamp Case (1889) and De La Rue card game (1894) also show her in a yellow dress. End of story.

Continue...

This originally appeared as an article in:

Knight Letter

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Winter 2010

Volume II Issue 15

Number 85

Fringe Alice is coming!

2011-01-06T16:40:00.001-08:00

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Whitman

Adriana Peliano

As aventuras de Alice dentro da toca do coelho ou através do espelho nos encoraja a procurarmos outras brechas para penetrarmos no maravilhoso.

Alice's adventures in the rabbit burrow or through the mantelpiece mirror encourage us to search for other gaps where we can penetrate the marvelous.

Mabille, Mirror of the marvellous

FRINGE ALICE

2011-01-06T13:27:00.001-08:00

to Mark Burstein

and Jenifer Ransom

texts and collages: Adriana Peliano

drawings of Nazareno after drafts of Adriana Peliano

"Alice in Wonderland" and Sophia: The Gnostic Hero's Journey

2010-12-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

Mari Shimizu

"Perhaps Alice and Sophia are just the main characters in the story of the archetypal hero's journey as part of the security of the home towards foreign lands that make little sense, but eventually offer great lessons. The difference is that Carroll and the Gnostics dare use of women as protagonists. "

Reproduced below the post for Michael Conner Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio blog where the author (apressentador weekly radio program in Chicago "Radioshow on Gnosticism") is not only a Gnostic reading of the classic "Alice in Wonderland" as Also, the author Lewis Carroll's connections with occultism and with all the esoteric stream which dominates the conservative societies in the nineteenth century Victorian. These connections explain the deep symbolism associated with the mythical archetype of Alice Sophia, the applicant hero's journey that Gnostic Fullness and Fall of reach, finally, the Resurrection and Renewal.

Mari Shimizu

Alice in Wonderland and the Occult

Miguel Conner

The success of Tim Burton’s adaption of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ should come as no shock. 'Alice in Wonderland' (and its sequel ‘Through a Looking Glass’) has mesmerized both children and adults for over a century and a half, never going out of print and continuously recycled in almost every form of media.

There has also been much written about the adventures of Alice, but very little on its Occult leanings and those of its creator, Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson). This is shocking considering 'Alice in Wonderland' is one of the most mystical and surreal works in all of literature. Beyond its impact on modern culture and art, the book has influenced the Occult (Aleister Crowley required that his magicians read both ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through a Looking Glass’).

Mari Shimizu

Beyond what appears to be a vibrant metaphor for a child’s view of the alien and often illogical world of adults, could Carroll have hidden Occult ideas in his classic?

It is documented that Carroll was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, an organization founded by Anglican clergyman for the study of spiritualism, ESP, clairvoyance and all type of paranormal activity (members of its American branch included William and Henry James).

In ‘The Annotated Alice’, Martin Gardner states that Carroll was a strong proponent of ESP and Psychokinesis. Carroll himself wrote that the mind could break through into the supernatural realms:

‘All seems to point to the existence of a natural force, allied to electricity and nerve-force, by which brain can act on brain. I think we close on the day when this shall be classed among the known natural forces, and its laws tabulated, and when the scientific skeptics, who always shut their eyes till the last moment to any evidence that seems to point beyond materialism, will have to accept it as a proved fact in nature(p.53).’

Mari Shimizu

This is clearly echoed in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the caterpillar is able to read Alice’s mind.

In ‘Through a Looking Glass’, Alice suddenly takes out a pencil and begins writing unintelligible words in a book before The White King. Gardner claims this scene was included because Carroll supported Automatic Writing (when a disembodied spirit is believed to seize the hand of a psychic) (p. 147).

This could possibly be the esoteric secret of Carroll’s famous riddle ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ After all, ravens are symbolical messengers of the dead while Automated Writing (performed on a desk) is also communication with the dead.

Lastly, Carroll is reported to have owned a large collection of books on the Occult (p. 53).

It’s surprising there is even this amount of evidence about his mystic interests and how they influenced his writings. Carroll was a Deacon for the Anglican Church, as well as a very private man who never granted interviews. And there is the mystery concerning the disappearance of his extensive diaries.

Mari Shimizu

There doesn’t seem to be anything overtly Gnostic about ‘Alice in Wonderland’ until one recognizes some of the major themes dealing with the heroine herself.

The saga of Alice has striking parallels to the myth of the fall of Sophia, as told in some Gnostic accounts:

--Both, out of boredom, curiosity and disobedience, are thrown into an existentialist dimension (Alice--Wonderland/ Sophia--The Chaos).
--Both often lose their direction and their very senses until aided by trickster beings (Alice--The Cheshire Cat/Sophia--The Cosmic Christ).
--Both seem to create bizarre creatures they must overcome (Alice—various entities but the dragon-like Jabberwocky is the most famous example/Sophia—Jehovah, who appears to her in a dragon-like form).
Both must pass tests of emotion and will so they can return to their primordial home (Alice—England; Sophia—The Pleroma).
--Both represent the Gnostic quest of the fallen soul in search for self-knowledge that will bring about restoration and release from corrupted matter (Alice must solve several riddles and often reflects on her own nature/Sophia must discover and utter the right prayers to understand herself and her place within The Eternal Realm she originated from).
--Both realize they are part of the living dream of an ultra-Supreme Being (Alice--The Red King/ Sophia--The Virgin Spirit/Bythos).
--Both have names that represent great human virtues (Alice means ‘truth’/Sophia means ‘wisdom’).

Even the greatest Gnostic Gospel of recent times, 'The Matrix', alludes to ‘Alice in Wonderland’. This solely happens when Morpheus (the god of dreams) teaches Neo (the Gnostic Jesus) that he must not only wake up from all false realities but also confront them:

‘I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?’

‘This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.’

Perhaps Alice and Sophia are simply the main characters in the archetypal story of the hero’s journey from the safety of home to foreign lands that make little sense but eventually offer great lessons. The difference is that Carroll and The Gnostics dared to use females as their protagonists.

To what extent Carroll used his knowledge of the Occult will never be fully known. It is simply accepted that the Anglican deacon and mathematician wrote stories to impress a young girl who inspired him.

Mari Shimizu

What is known is that Carroll joins a prestigious list of artists who despite living in conservative societies dipped into the stream of The Esoterica and drew out the timeless waters of mystic creativity. Whether or not ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was consciously injected with Gnosticism is not truly important. As Bishop Stephan Hoeller once said, ‘Any serious artist is already half a Gnostic.’

Such insights might actually add new dimensions to reading Gnostic texts, which Lewis Carroll never lived to see. This is a pity because both Carroll and The Gnostics enjoyed puns, wild interpretations, brisk fantasy landscapes and meanings that had no meaning unless one possessed the Sophia of a child or the wit of a philosopher-poet. And there is that eternal connection among those who dip into that stream of The Esoterica for those timeless waters of mystic creativity.

A fun example Carroll might appreciate could be found in The Gospel of Philip that states ‘Truth (Alice) did not come into the world (Wonderland/The Matrix) naked, but it(she) came in types and images. The world (Wonderland/The Matrix) will not receive truth (Alice) in any other way.’

Mari Shimizu

Or would Carroll believe, like with Alice and Sophia, that the Gnostics had simply tumbled down a rabbit-hole?

Found HERE

"Alice no País das Maravilhas" e o Ocultismo

2010-12-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

A verdade é que a verdade pode não ser, pois a ver da de mim, a ver da de você, a ver da de qualquer um, qualquer lugar e hora, todas elas são pedaços de um caleidoscópio. As ver da de Lewis e Einstem se assemelham, eles conseguiram ver da de relatividade nas coisas todas, cujo conjunto delas é que faz sentido, forma o todo, se quiser o absoluto.

Jos Perpel

Mari Shimizu

"Talvez Alice e Sophia sejam simplesmente as principais personagens da história arquetípica da viagem do herói que parte da segurança do lar em direção de terras estrangeiras que fazem pouco sentido, mas eventualmente oferecem grandes lições. A diferença é que Carroll e os gnósticos se atreveram a usar mulheres como protagonistas."

Reproduzimos e traduzimos abaixo o post de Miguel Conner para o blog Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio onde o autor (apressentador do programa radiofônico semanal em Chicago "Radioshow on Gnosticism") faz não apenas uma leitura gnóstica do clássico "Alice no País das Maravilhas" como, também, as conexões do autor Lewis Carroll com o Ocultismo e com todo o fluxo esotérico que invadiu as sociedades conservadoras vitorianas no século XIX. Essas conexões explicariam os profundos simbolismos míticos de Alice associado ao arquétipo de Sophia, a recorrente jornada do herói gnóstico que da Plenitude e Queda alcança, ao final, a Ressurreição e Renovação.

Mari Shimizu

Miguel Conner

O sucesso da adaptação de Tim Burton de “Alice no País das Maravilhas” não deve surpreender ninguém. "Alice no País das Maravilhas" (e sua sequência "Através do Espelho”) tem fascinado crianças e adultos há mais de um século e meio, merecendo sucessivas edições impressas e remakes em diferentes formas de mídias.

Muito tem sido escrito sobre as peripécias da Alice, mas muito pouco sobre as inspirações ocultistas da estória e do seu criador, Lewis Carroll (nome real de Charles Dodgson). Isto é surpreedente, considerando que “Alice no País das Maravilhas” é uma das obras mais místicas e surreais de toda a literatura. Para além do seu impacto na cultura e arte contemporânea, o livro influenciou o ocultismo (Aleister Crowley exigia que seus discípulos lessem tanto "Alice no País das Maravilhas" como "Através do Espelho").

Além da estória se constituir numa vibrante metáfora sobre uma criança no mundo estranho e, muitas vezes ilógico, dos adultos, Carroll poderia ter escondido idéias ocultas em seu clássico?

Mari Shimizu

É documentado que Carroll era um membro da Sociedade de Pesquisas Psíquicas, uma organização fundada por um pastor anglicano para o estudo do Espiritismo, Percepção Extra-Sensorial (PES), clarividência e todo o tipo de atividade paranormal (entre os membros da sua filial americana estavam William e Henry James).

Martin Gardner afirma em "The Annotated Alice" que Carroll era um forte defensor da PES e psicocinese. O próprio Carroll escreveu que a mente poderia romper os reinos sobrenaturais:

"Tudo parece apontar a existência de uma força natural, aliada à eletricidade e à força nervosa, através do cérebro, e que pode atuar sobre o cérebro. Acho que vai chegar o dia em classificaremos isso entre as forças naturais conhecidas, e as suas leis tabuladas e, quanto aos cientistas céticos que sempre fecham os olhos até o último momento para todas as provas que aponta para além do materialismo, terão de aceitá-la como um fato comprovado na natureza" (p.53).

Isto claramente ecoou em 'Alice no País das Maravilhas ", onde a lagarta possui o poder de ler a mente de Alice.

Em "Através do Espelho", de repente, Alice pega uma caneta e começa a escrever palavras ininteligíveis em um livro antes do rei branco. Gardner afirma que essa cena foi incluída porque Carroll acreditava na “Escrita Automática” (quando um espírito desencarnado utiliza-se da mão de um médium) (p. 147).

Este poderia ser o segredo do enigma esotérico famoso de Carroll: "Por que um corvo é como uma escrivaninha?" Afinal, os corvos são mensageiros simbólicos dos mortos, enquanto a Escrita Automática (realizada em uma mesa) é também uma forma de comunicação com os mortos.

Por último, relata-se que Carroll era possuidor de uma grande coleção de livros sobre o ocultismo (pág. 53).

Mari Shimizu

É surpreendente a quantidade de provas sobre o seu interesse místico e como isso influenciou seus escritos. Carroll era diácono da Igreja Anglicana, assim como um homem muito privado, que não concedia entrevistas. E aí está o mistério sobre o desaparecimento dos seus extensos diários.

Aparentemente nada parece ser abertamente gnóstico em “Alice no País das Maravilhas” até reconhecermos alguns dos principais temas em torno da heroína.

A saga do Alice tem impressionantes paralelos ao mito da queda de Sophia, tal como descrito em alguns contos gnósticos:

. Ambas, de tédio, curiosidade e desobediência, são jogados em uma dimensão existencial (Alice - Sophia – O Chaos).

. Ambas, frequentemente, perdem a sua direção e os seus sentidos, e até ao auxiliadas por seres maliciosos (Alice - O Gato de Cheshire / Sophia - O Cristo Cósmico).

. Ambas parecem criar bizarras criaturas que elas têm de superar (Alice entidades diferentes, mas o dragão Jabberwocky-como é o exemplo mais famoso / Sophia-Jehovah, que aparece para ela sob a forma de um dragão)

. Ambas devem passar por testes emocionais para que possam retornar ao seu lar primordial (Alice-Inglaterra; Sophia-O Pleroma).

. Ambas representam a busca gnóstica da alma caída em busca do autoconhecimento, que trará restauração e liberação da matéria corrompida (Alice deve resolver diversas adivinhações e, muitas vezes, refletir sobre sua própria natureza / Sophia deve descobrir e pronunciar as preces corretas para compreender a si mesma e seu lugar dentro do reino eterno que ajudou a criar).

. Ambas percebem que eles são parte do sonho vívido de um Ultra-Ser Supremo (Alice - O Rei Vermelho / Sophia - O Espírito Virgem/Bythos).

. Ambas têm nomes que representam grandes virtudes humano (“Alice” significa Verdade/ “Sophia” significa Sabedoria).

Mari Shimizu

Mesmo o maior evangelho gnóstico dos últimos tempos, o filme Matrix, faz alusão a “Alice no País das Maravilhas”. Isso acontece quando Morpheus (o deus dos sonhos) ensina Neo (Jesus gnóstico) que ele deve despertar não só acima de todas as realidades falsas, mas também confrontá-las:

"Imagino que agora você está se sentindo um pouco como a Alice. Hein!? Caindo no buraco do coelho!?

'Esta é a sua última chance. Depois disso, não há como voltar atrás. Você toma a pílula azul - A história acaba, e você acorda em seu quarto e acreditar no que quiser acreditar. Se tomar a pílula vermelha vai permanecer no País das Maravilhas e eu te mostrarei o quão profundo é buraco do coelho. "

Talvez Alice e Sophia sejam simplesmente os principais personagens da história arquetípica da viagem do herói que parte da segurança do lar em direção de terras estrangeiras que fazem pouco sentido, mas eventualmente oferecem grandes lições. A diferença é que Carroll e os gnósticos se atreveram a usar mulheres como protagonistas.

Em que medida Carroll usou seu conhecimento sobre ocultismo, isso nunca será plenamente conhecido. É simplesmente aceito que o diácono anglicano e matemático escreveu histórias para impressionar uma garota que o inspirou.

Mari Shimizu

O que se sabe é que Carroll se junta a uma lista de artistas de prestígio que, a despeito de viver em sociedades conservadoras, mergulhou no fluxo do esoterismo e tirou das águas intemporais a criatividade mística. Pouco importa se 'Alice no País das Maravilhas' foi conscientemente influenciada pelo Gnosticismo. Como o Bispo Stephan Hoeller disse certa vez: "Qualquer artista sério já é um meio Gnóstico”.

Essas idéias podem realmente adicionar novas interpretações de leitura sobre os textos gnósticos, que nunca Lewis Carroll viveu para ver. É uma pena, porque tanto Carroll como os gnósticos apreciam trocadilhos, as interpretações selvagens, paisagens fantasiosas ricas em significados que não têm sentido a menos que possua a Sabedoria (Sophia) de uma criança ou a sagacidade de um filósofo-poeta. E aí é que reside a eterna ligação entre aqueles que mergulham no fluxo de esoterismo e as águas intemporais da criatividade mística.

Um exemplo divertido que Carroll pôde apreciar pode ser encontrada no Evangelho de Filipe, onde afirma que “a Verdade (Alice) não veio ao mundo (País das Maravilhas / A Matrix) nua, mas ele (ela) veio por meio de letras e imagens. O mundo (País das Maravilhas / A Matrix) não receberá a verdade (Alice) de qualquer outra maneira.”

Ou poderia seria Carroll acreditar, tal como Alice e Sophia, que os gnósticos tenham simplesmente despencado num buraco de coelho?

encontrado AQUI

Mari Shimizu

Corpus Puparum. Estética de la Tentación y la Nostalgia

2010-11-30T16:48:00.000-08:00

Autora: Sávitri Martínez

Blog of Sávitri Martínez HERE

Alice by Nicoletta Ceccioli "Incubi Celesti"

2010-11-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

These hauntingly beautiful, ethereal portraits of Alice in Wonderland-like figures clad in blue are from Nicoletti Ceccoli’s new body of work, fittingly titled Incubi Celesti (or “Heavenly Nightmares”).

See more Alices by Nicoletti Ceccoli
"Doroty Circus Gallery" site HERE

Childs secret

2010-10-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Brigitta Lopez

Found HERE

Like a pool of tears

2010-10-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

Janaína Tschape, Água Viva, 2003.

Janaína Tschape, He drowned in her eyes as she called him to follow, 1999.

"I wish I hadn't cried so much!" said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today."

James Joyce e Lewis Carroll

2010-10-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Arte: Adriana Peliano

Telescopic girl

2010-09-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

Farnese de Andrade

Farnese de Andrade, Tudo continua sempre, 1974.

"What a curious feeling!" said Alice. "I must be shutting up like a telescope!"

O sorriso do gato : sobre a vida de Lewis Carroll

2010-09-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Ilustração de Jô Oliveira

Alice e Emília num quiprocó

2010-09-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Alice and Emilia in Yellow Woodpecker Ranch compete for the attention of the angel with a broken wing.

Map of the World of Wonders.

LOBATO, Monteiro. Memórias da Emília. São Paulo: Edito

ra Brasiliense, 1955.

Ilustração de Belmonte para Memórias da Emília.

Ilustração de A.L. Bowley (1921) para Alice no País das Maravilhas.

Prefácio de Monteiro Lobato para a primeira edição da tradução de "Alice no país das maravilhas" para o português.

Lewis Carroll por Nelly Novaes Coelho

2010-09-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Adriana Peliano

DIÁLOGO ENTRE FIGURAS

2010-09-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

"Reinações de Narizinho". Ilustração de Manoel Victor filho.

Lúcia and Alice travel in a boat by the river. They talk about their adventures in the novels "The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland" (England, 1865), "Through the Looking glass and what Alice found there" (England, 1872) and "Romps of Little nose" (Brazil, 1931). Lúcia is "little nose", the character of the first Brazilian book for children. It was written in the same year of the first translation of "Alice in Wonderland" to Portuguese, both by the writer Monteiro Lobato. The stories present several curious connections.

left: Nasino (italian edition of A menina do Nazinho arrebitado "The girl of the snub nose"). illustrated by Vicenzo Nicoletti, 1954.
right: Alice in wonderland, illustrated by Rene Cloake, 1945.

Colagem de Adriana Peliano sobre a Narizinho de Voltolino (1920) e a Alice de John Tenniel (1865).

AS REINAÇÕES DE ALICE E AS AVENTURAS DE LÚCIA.

Adriana Peliano (1)

Lúcia e Alice passeavam de barco num ribeirão que ligava o Sítio do Picapau Amarelo ao País das Maravilhas. As amigas se reuniam depois de muito tempo distantes e logo começaram a trocar confidências e figurinhas. O assunto predileto das duas eram suas próprias aventuras, cada qual uma fã incondicional das histórias da outra. Alice no País das Maravilhas era o livro predileto de Narizinho. Alice, por sua vez, falava português muito bem, pois já tinha sido traduzida e publicada no Brasil pela primeira vez pelo próprio Monteiro Lobato (2), além de ter visitado o Sítio do Picapau Amarelo em mais de uma história do autor. (3)

Era uma tarde dourada e o azul do céu sem nuvens se mirava no espelho das águas que fluíam lentamente enquanto o barco deslizava rio abaixo, num fluxo de brincadeiras, memórias e revelações. O barco, vindo do Reino das Águas Claras, era encantado e gracioso e a viagem era embalada por lindas canções executadas por um músico da côrte do príncipe escamado. – Deve ter sido em uma tarde como essa que Lewis Carroll contou a minha história pela primeira vez para Alice Liddell e suas irmãs, naquele memorável passeio de barco em Oxford, na época vitoriana. E foi nas margens desse riacho em que navegamos, lá perto do Sítio do Picapau Amarelo, que começaram as suas Reinações, não foi mesmo Lúcia?

Inga-Karin Erikson (1993)

- Foi sim. Logo no início do livro que Lobato dedicou a mim, Reinações de Narizinho (4), depois de dar comida aos peixinhos, senti os olhos pesados de sono. Me deitei na grama com a minha boneca no braço e fiquei seguindo as nuvens que passeavam pelo céu, formando ora castelos, ora caramelos. E já ia dormindo, embalada pelo mexerico das águas, quando senti cócegas no rosto. Arregalei os olhos e vi um peixinho vestido de gente em pé na ponta de meu nariz. Vestido de gente, sim! Trazia casaco vermelho, cartola na cabeça e guarda chuva na mão, a maior das galantezas. Depois descobriríamos que o peixinho também usava um relógio. Em seguida pousou no meu rosto um besouro também vestido de gente, trajando sobrecasaca preta, óculos e bengala. Achei tudo aquilo tão interessante! (5)

Jean G. Villin em Reinações de Narizinho, 1931.

- A minha história começou de um jeito parecido. Eu estava com minha irmã na margem do rio e já estava começando a me aborrecer de ficar sentada sem nada para fazer. Dava uma ou outra espiada no livro que ela estava lendo, mas implicava: "De que serve um livro sem figuras nem diálogos?" Cheia de preguiça, por causa do calor do dia, eu me perguntava se o prazer de fazer um colar de margaridas valeria o esforço de me levantar e colher as flores, quando de repente um Coelho Branco de olhos rosados passou correndo junto de mim. Nada havia de muito estranho naquilo. Nem achei assim tão esquisito quando ouvi o Coelho dizer para si mesmo: – Oh, meu Deus! Como estou atrasado! Mas, quando ele tirou um relógio do bolso do colete, olhou as horas e correu apressado, eu me levantei, dando-me conta de que nunca antes havia visto um coelho nem com colete e nem com um relógio no bolso. Ardendo de curiosidade, segui correndo o coelho campo a fora, a tempo de vê-lo penetrar numa grande toca debaixo da cerca.
(6)

A.L. Bowley (1921) em Alice no País das Maravilhas.

Narizinho achou graça. – O engraçado é que o peixinho e o besouro pousaram no meu rosto e encrencaram logo com o meu nariz, pensando que ele fosse também uma espécie de toca de alguma besta fera. Logo eu, com o apelido de Narizinho, virei logo um narigão, numa brincadeira divertida com a relatividade do tamanho. Um pouco depois ficamos amigos e eu saí com o peixinho, que descobri ser um nobre príncipe e de quem eu ficaria noiva tempos depois, até que chegamos a uma gruta misteriosa que era a entrada para o maravilhoso Reino das Águas Claras. Dei uma espiada, com medo de entrar, e quase desisti, pois Emília, minha boneca, era muito medrosa. Mas o peixinho tirou do bolso um vaga lume que lhe servia de lanterna viva. A gruta clareou até que a boneca perdeu o medo. Entramos e pelo caminho fomos saudados por várias corujas e morcegos. Minutos depois chegamos ao portão do Reino, nossa, era tão maravilhoso, que até parecia um sonho.

Voltolino em Narizinho Arrebitado (1920).

Alice rapidamente interferiu na história muito entusiasmada: - Essas tocas todas são verdadeiros portais de passagem para outros mundos, não é Lúcia? Isso tudo é tão emocionante!

Adriana Peliano (2010). Colagem sobre John Tenniel (1865) e João Fahrion (1933) em Lewis Carroll na Era Vitoriana.

- Verdade, pela toca viajamos para outros reinos, mas e como voltamos de lá? É bom lembrar que no meu primeiríssimo livro, A menina do Narizinho Arrebitado (7), minha aventura no Reino das Águas Claras só terminava quando eu acordava. O leitor ficava então sabendo que ‘tudo não tinha passado de um lindo sonho’. Já nas minhas Reinações, quando aquela primeira história foi reescrita e aumentada, eu volto do mundo maravilhoso para o Sítio por uma ventania muito forte, que me arrasta junto com a Emília do fundo do oceano para a beira do ribeirãozinho do pomar. Foi assim que retornamos ao Sítio do Picapau Amarelo dessa vez. Lobato mudou a história nesse ponto e agora o maravilhoso e o mundo real se misturam na mesma dimensão, não existe mais aquela separação do sono, entende? Ele superou esse dualismo. Acho que foi uma grande ousadia do Lobato.

Jean G. Villin (1931) em Reinações de Narizinho.

Alice ouviu aquilo atentamente, ponderando consigo mesma. Será que se foi tudo um sonho, a história fica mais sem graça? Pensou. Acho que não, nas minhas histórias acordo sempre no final, mas é o próprio Lewis Carroll quem nos pergunta no final do livro do espelho: O que é a vida, senão um sonho? Assim a vida se torna sonho e o sonho se torna vida, não é? Se nas minhas aventuras do outro lado do espelho eu podia ser parte do sonho do Rei Vermelho (8), ficará sempre a dúvida se tudo não passa de um sonho dentro de um sonho e as fronteiras se diluem... E então perguntou para Narizinho: - Mas percebi que em outros momentos nas suas Reinações, você e o pessoal do Sítio (9) viajam pelo mundo das maravilhas abrindo e fechando os olhos. Esse não é exatamente o caminho do Reino dos sonhos? Lembro também que Dona Aranha costurou o seu vestido de noiva com o príncipe encantado com um tecido feito pela fada miragem, cortado com a tesoura da imaginação, costurado com a agulha da fantasia e com que linha? A linha do sonho. A mesma linha que costura o maravilhoso e a realidade. Porque então desprezar o sonho? Carroll não fazia uma separação cartesiana, pelo contrário. É como aquela história do sábio chinês que não sabia se tinha sonhado que era uma borboleta ou se era uma borboleta que sonhava ser um homem...

Adriana Peliano (2010). Colagem sobre Gertrude Thompson (1890) e fotografias de Lewis Carroll em Lewis Carroll na Era Vitoriana.

Narizinho refletiu. - De fato Lewis Carroll também mistura o maravilhoso, o sonho e a realidade. Acima de tudo ele coloca em cheque essas fronteiras. Mas enquanto você viaja para mundos maravilhosos, nos livros de Lobato as criaturas dos reinos maravilhosos vêm ao Sítio e o pessoal do Sítio viajam para outros mundos. Abolem-se as fronteiras. Esses seres encantados chegam até a se mudar para o Sítio... Não mais o sonho, mas o real penetrado pela magia! (10)

– Mudando um pouco de assunto, Alice, acho que o Lobato leu e gostou tanto dos seus livros e seguiu a partir dali abrindo novos caminhos em sua obra infantil. Ele é o fundador da literatura infantil brasileira, sabe? (11) Assim como Lewis Carroll, subverteu o moralismo das histórias infantis de sua época e escreveu livros com muito respeito pela inteligência da criança. Essa idéia de misturar os personagens de diferentes histórias por exemplo, ou de propor viagens entre a realidade e o mundo das maravilhas, acho que Lobato trouxe da leitura de Alice, como de Peter Pan. Mas Alice, enquanto você vai e volta dos mundos maravilhosos só um vez em cada um dos seus livros, nas histórias do Sitio agente vai e volta o tempo todo, visitando várias terras das maravilhas, graças ao famoso pó de pirlimpimpim que o Peter Pan nos deu de presente. Esse pó também é uma espécie de portal mágico, desbravador de pontes entre as histórias e incessantes cruzamentos entre os mundos da imaginação, além de permitir até viagens no tempo! Enquanto você cai naquele poço profuuundo! nós muitas vezes viajamos na velocidade da luz!

O pó de pirlimpimpim (1931).

E essa história de cheirar o pó de pirlimpimpim, Lúcia, ninguém te perturba não? Perguntou Alice. Me lembro que depois de cheirarem o pó vocês se sentiam leves como plumas ou dançarinas num sonho encantado. E boiavam no espaço como bolhas de sabão levadas por um vento de extraordinária rapidez. Outra hora Lobato fala que o efeito do pirlimpimpim parece clorofórmio!!! Lewis Carroll era também interessado em estados alterados da mente, quando o mundo das fadas passa a ser percebido com facilidade. Ele até fez um livro sobre isso, sabe? Se chama “Sílvia e Bruno”. Mas estou cansada de ver gente me perguntar: essa história de comer cogumelo, hein Alice !? Esse Lewis Carroll era um doidão? – Sabe que eu também tenho passado por isso... Retrucou Narizinho. Já me perguntaram até se meu apelido é Narizinho de tanto cheirar pó de Pirlimpimpim, vejam só. Tanto que depois mudaram a história para o seriada de TV, e agente não podia mais cheirar o pó era só falar pirlimpimpim que agente viajava, tiraram o pó. Esses tais de politicamente corretos, não sei não... – É ... Alice, Peter Pan, Pinóquio, Dom Quixote, Robinson Crusoé, Gulliver, Chapeuzinho... Esse Lobato adorava livros de viagens, ele estava sempre “viajando”... E as duas deram boas risadas.

D. R. Sexton em Alice no País das Maravilhas, 1933.

Sítio do picapau amarelo em quadrinhos. 1979.

- O Monteiro Lobato era bem esperto, não é Lúcia? Bebeu das minhas histórias, de Peter Pan, Pinóquio, Gulliver, Dom Quixote, Robinson Crusoé e tantas outras. Você ficou minha amiga, em outra história foi engolida pela Cuca como Chapeuzinho foi engolida pelo lobo, outra hora ficou noiva de um príncipe encantado e teve o seu vestido maravilhoso costurado pela Dona Aranha, costureira de todas as princesas dos contos de fadas... Pedrinho, seu primo, era amigo do Peter Pan e já Emília, sua boneca, era asneirenta como o Pinóquio, e como o boneco, virou gente. Só que Emília não se enquadra como o Pinóquio que fica bonzinho e comportado, Emília é cada vez mais independente e desafiadora. Vocês até criaram um boneco de madeira, o João faz-de-conta, irmão do Pinóquio! Pelo que estou vendo não só os personagens do mundo das maravilhas visitaram o Sítio do Picapau quanto de fato Lobato se alimentou de todas essas fontes e recriou tudo isso em seus livros como num grande rocambole. Pensando bem, ele era um autêntico “historiófago” não é? Um comedor de histórias! (Perguntou Alice, orgulhosa de falar difícil) Narizinho riu e respondeu: sabe o que ele dizia? Quem copia macaqueia, quem imita, recria. E as duas riram de novo.

O irmão de Pinocchio (1929).

Nunca me esqueço que as minhas Reinações e as suas Aventuras viraram livro no Brasil no mesmo ano não é? Em 1931. Lobato não dava ponto sem nó. Pena de papagaio saiu em 1930, no ano em que ele traduziu Peter Pan e tem tudo a ver um livro com o outro, Reinações de Narizinho saiu no ano em que ele traduziu Alice no Pais das Maravilhas e as Novas Reinações de Narizinho, no ano em que ele traduziu Alice através do Espelho, em 1933. Ele até contou no prefácio do Pais Maravilhas, traduzido por ele, que fui eu quem pediu que ele traduzisse as suas histórias, se lembra Alice? - Acho que ele percebeu logo que agente ficaria amiga, não é a toa que tem tanta coisa em comum nos livros da gente, não acha? Retrucou Alice. - Verdade! Nunca conversamos sobre isso direito não é? - Respondeu Narizinho. - Todas as vezes que você foi ao Sitio, em Reinações de Narizinho, Memórias de Emília, em Sitio do Picapau Amarelo e no conto As fadas (12), tinha tanta Reinação correndo solta que tivemos pouco tempo para trocar idéias, completou.

Peter Pan de Monteiro Lobato (1930) | O Picapau Amarelo (1939) | Memórias da Emília (1936)

Outra semelhança que eu vejo em nossas histórias é que Reinações de Narizinho é composto de vários episódios, previamente publicados, compostos em capítulos (13). Essa é outra coisa que eu acho que o Lobato também aprendeu com o Lewis Carroll. - Disse Alice. - Os livros de Alice também são compostos de episódios que foram inventados pouco a pouco. No caso do país das maravilhas, alguns episódios já estavam no manuscrito das Aventuras de Alice no Subterrâneo em 1863 outros só apareceram na publicação da obra completa, em 1865. Ao mesmo tempo, no país do espelho, Carroll desenvolve os capítulos do Humpty Dumpty, dos gêmeos Tweedle Dee e Tweedle Dum e do Leão e o Unicórnio por exemplo, através de referências a jogos e canções infantis conhecidas; enquanto Lobato reuniu em suas histórias personagens de quase todas as origens e mídias existentes na época. Elas são povoadas por figuras de mitos como Hércules, Medusa, Perseu e Minotauro; contos de fadas como Branca de Neve, Chapeuzinho Vermelho, Cinderela e Barba Azul; do cinema e dos desenhos animados como Tom Mix , Mickey Mouse e Gato Felix; de personagens extraídos da cultura popular como o Saci (14), o lobisomem, o curupira (15) e a mula-sem-cabeça (16); do mundo das fábulas como a Cigarra e a Formiga; das mil e uma noites; entre tanto outros. Esses personagens todos questionam as histórias de onde vieram e vêm viver novas aventuras com o pessoal do Sítio. Lewis Carroll primeiro e depois Lobato foram precursores de um tipo de brincadeira que recentemente fez sucesso nas histórias em quadrinhos e no desenho animado Shrek, por exemplo.

Humpty Dumpty. nursery rhyme.

esq.: Narizinho e Chapeuzinho. Manuel Victor Filho. | dir.: Shrek forever after (2010).

O circo de escavalinho (1929), Cara de coruja, Aventuras do príncipe, O Gato Felix, O Noivado de Narizinho (1928).

- Enquanto na sua história Carroll criou o Pais das Maravilhas, nas minhas Reinações, Lobato criou o Mundo das Maravilhas. Ele ampliou o território, entende? Continuou Narizinho. - Ele criou até um mapa desse mundo, onde o Pais das Maravilhas convive com o Sitio do Picapau Amarelo, o mar dos piratas, a terra de Gulliver, o pais das fábulas, e tantos outros reinos maravilhosos. É muito fácil viajar por esses reinos quando se tem imaginação ou o famoso pó de pirlimpimpim.

O mundo das maravilhas – ilustração do livro Pena de papagaio (1930) que iria ser integrado em Reinações de Narizinho (1931).

Você já percebeu que a todo momento agente encontra alguma relação entre as nossas histórias? Perguntou Alice. As histórias em si são bem diferentes, mas aqui e ali agente se depara com muitas semelhanças. Por exemplo: quando você chega com o peixinho no Reino das águas claras, encontra com o major agarra que é uma rã. Quando eu chego na casa da duquesa no país das maravilhas, encontro como o lacaio peixe e o lacaio rã. Na porta do castelo no livro do espelho, Alice também encontra um sapo. Narizinho rebateu: – No reino das águas claras tem uma dança de quadrilha com siris e outros vários animais marinhos, como no capítulo da falsa tartaruga e da quadrilha da lagosta do Pais das Maravilhas. Alice rebateu, num divertido ping-pong de idéias: - No reino do espelho, encontrei uma borboleta de asas de pão com manteiga, a Bread and butterfly, Emília encontra uma borboleta e faz dela um telegrama: um borboletograma, também uma palavra valise, feita com dois significados embrulhados numa palavra só, invenção de Lewis Carroll. Enquanto eu encontro os insetos do espelho, vocês vão visitar o reino das abelhas e a Dona Aranha costureira. – Isso mesmo! – Rebateu Narizinho! - E enquanto você encontra o Gato de Cheshire, nós encontramos o falso Gato Felix. Foi a vez de Alice - Enquanto vocês encontram o pássaro roca, eu encontro o grifo, um outro animal mitológico. - Emília até já visitou as cartas do baralho, o que você também faz no final do seu primeiro livro! - Sem falar em todas as aventuras que não foram contadas nos livros!!! Comentou Alice muito entusiasmada. E continuaram costurando idéias e trocando figurinhas até que terminaram cantando juntas a versão que Lobato fez da cantiga Pirolito que bate, bate (17) e a que Carroll fez de thinkle, thinkle little star (18) .

esq.: Voltolino em A menina do narizinho arrebitado (1920).

centro.: John Tenniel em Através do espelho e o que alice encontrou lá (1872).

dir.: ohn Tenniel em Aventuras de Alice no País das Maravilhas (1865).

– E não é que você tem razão? Disse Narizinho. Você disse agora pouco que o Lobato era um tipo de “historiófago” mas acho que é um tipo de antropófago também, no sentido que deu um outro escritor brasileiro daquela época, o Oswald de Andrade, que formulou várias idéias modernistas sobre a cultura brasileira. Para ele nossa cultura tinha que devorar o estrangeiro, como um canibal, digerir e assimilar a sua força para então se recriar, incorporando o outro. Lobato criticava uma importação da cultura estrangeira sem crítica e sem incorporação à nossa própria realidade. Acho que Lobato também digeriu as idéias de Carroll, Collodi, Barrie, Swift, Perrault, irmãos Grimm e fez uma feijoada bem brasileira... – Hummm! Rocambole, feijoada, está me dando uma fome... É como se esses quitutes me dissessem: Coma-me, coma-me! Adoro histórias de comidas e bebidas! - disse Alice. Acontece sempre alguma coisa interessante comigo quando como ou bebo alguma coisa. Dessa vez Narizinho se surpreendeu e olhou para o céu, sem saber o que dizer diante da asneira da inglesinha...

- Sabe que eu também me sinto um pouco parecida com a Emília? Comentou Alice. Emília muda muito, toda hora tem alguma coisa diferente. De boneca virou gentinha, vira bruxa, vira fada, ela adora essas histórias de virar. Muda a boca mais para baixo ou mais para cima. Muda as sobrancelhas, muda os olhos. Houve até uma vez que Emília passou sem olhos cinco dias, se lembra? Ela arregalou tantos os seus olhinhos de retrós que eles estouraram! Ela cria, recria, desafia e dá a língua... Tem horas que ela parece bem maior, outra hora cabe no bolso, chegou até a virar a chave do tamanho e reduziu a humanidade inteira a um tamanho minúsculo. Como eu, ela andou minúscula num jardim gigante e encontrou vários insetos... - Só que enquanto você viaja para mundos maravilhos, Emília viaja pelo mundo real, só que transformado, gigante, revelando a estranheza do nosso próprio mundo. Lobato disse uma vez que esse livro era uma demonstração pitoresca da relatividade das coisas, disse Narizinho. - De fato a história é diferente, mas a própria Emília fala no livro (19) que acha que aquelas aventuras estão se parecendo muito com as minhas no país das maravilhas... Continuou Alice. Eu também mudo o tempo todo, cresço, diminuo, encolho, estico, aprendo, questiono, duvido. – Acho que todo mundo é assim, completou Narizinho, só que ainda não sabe... Mas a Emília mais zombeteira e atrevida e não sabe se comportar direito como você. Ela também não tem tanta crise de identidade, ela é toda cheia de si, e tem resposta para tudo. Enquanto você é contrariada a todo momento pelas estranhas criaturas que encontra, Emília consegue que tudo seja feito do jeito dela. É muito brasileira essa danada, tem um jeitinho para tudo. Não imagino o escândalo que seria uma boneca mal criada como ela em plena Inglaterra vitoriana!

A chave do tamanho (1942)

Alice encontra Emília. Jô Oliveira.

- Mas a Emília é muito esperta, continuou Narizinho, toda orgulhosa da boneca, sua companheira de viagens e melhor amiga. Ninguém pode entender como funciona a cabecinha dela! Ora raciocina muito bem, tal qual gente. Outras vezes pensa tão torto que deixa uma pessoa atrapalhada. Certa vez disse ao Sr. La Fontaine que não fizesse caso da boneca, visto que ela não batia bem da bola. Ele disse por sua vez que Emília tinha uma estranha personalidade, o que deixou claro para todo mundo que ela não é nada boba como pode às vezes parecer. Quando aprendeu a falar, depois de ingerir uma pílula falante do Dr. Caramujo, o médico do Reino das Águas Claras (20), Emília falou três horas sem tomar fôlego. Essa falação é a cara dela, como uma torneirinha de asneiras que ela tem dentro.

- É verdade, disse Alice, nas suas asneiras Emília tem uma lógica incrível! Ela questiona todas as normas e os padrões estabelecidos, subverte o bom senso e o senso comum sugerindo propostas desconcertantes e desafiadoras. Narizinho completou: - Em sua canastra Emília leva um monte de cacarecos que vai catando em suas viagens pelos reinos maravilhosos, já trouxe até umas estrelinhas da via láctea (21). Certa vez, ofereceu ao Sr. La Fontaine, para cortar o cabelo, uma tesoura de uma perna só. E quando ele questionou o fato da tesoura ter uma perna só, Emilia, que não se atrapalha nunca, respondeu prontamente: pois corte o cabelo de um lado só! (22) Ela é cheia dessas histórias.

Viagem ao céu (1932)

- Emília desmascara as palavras, explora o trocadilho e o duplo sentido, subvertendo a linguagem de forma lúdica e espirituosa. Olha Narizinho, estou para te dizer que o que a Emília faz é um autêntico nonsense brasileiro! Ela brinca com a cultura popular, e suas adivinhas, parlendas, cantigas infantis e surpreende o tempo todo virando o sentido do avesso. – É verdade, completou Narizinho. Só que o nonsense dela é diferente. Nos seus livros me parece que você se depara a todo momento com o nonsense do Pais das Maravilhas, que te faz questionar a lógica e sua própria identidade, mas ao mesmo tempo desmascara a falta de sentido do poder reinante e das normas sociais. No caso da Emília, quem cria o nonsense é ela mesma, zombando das regras e do bom senso. Muita gente acredita que ela é o porta-voz de Monteiro Lobato, completou Narizinho - um autor sempre inquieto e muito crítico, que atuou ativamente em várias áreas da cultura, não abrindo mão de participar de todas as questões importantes referentes ao seu país e à sua época. Sua literatura infantil era parte fundamental de um projeto de transformação do Brasil. Monteiro Lobato queria transformar o país através da infância.

Hummm, tenho uma hipótese, continuou Alice. - Quem sabe você está para Alice no país das maravilhas como Emília está para Alice através do Espelho? Ao invés do subterrâneo, você viaja pelo mundo sub aquático, já Emília viaja pelo país da gramática, desconcertando a lógica e a linguagem.

Alice e Emília. | Memórias da Emília | Ilustração: Belmonte | São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional,1936.

– Lewis Carroll entendia bem o que era ser criança na época dele, considerou Alice. Ele atingiu a essência universal da infância e captou desilusões, medos e desorientações do dia a dia das crianças. Lewis Carroll desafio a autoridade e o poder, tal como uma menina que um dia gritou que “O rei está nu!”. Com Lewis Carroll questionei a lógica e aprendi a árdua tarefa de pensar. Seus livros ajudam a criança a tomar consciência de si e mostram não ser ela a única a sentir o que sente. Talvez eles indiquem até mesmo aos adultos como respeitar a criança. As aventuras que Carroll escreveu ajudam as crianças a crescerem. Esse livro é doido, Lúcia, o sentido dele está em nós. (24)

A maioria dos livros para crianças da minha época, acrescentou Alice, tinha objetivos ditos nobres: ensinar e pregar, pois as cartilhas ministravam princípios religiosos junto com a tabuada. Livros sisudos e didáticos estimulavam temer o pecado e infundir disciplina e obediência. Raramente se dava crédito à inteligência da criança, à sensibilidade ou imaginação. Carroll fundou a literatura infantil de verdade, aquela que não dá aulinha e nem lição de moral, mas que explora bem a linguagem. Acho que Lobato aprendeu com ele. Só que os seus livros de Alice apesar do humor, são mais angustiados e angustiantes, as histórias do Sítio do Picapau Amarelo têm um outro espírito mais frugal e mais debochado.

Alice e Emília. Colagem de Adriana Peliano.

É tanta coisa... Já reparou que o Lobato adorava se corresponder com seus leitores e trocou muitas cartas com crianças, como Carroll se correspondeu com suas amiguinhas? - Comentou Narizinho. Além disso muitos de seus leitores se tornaram personagens de suas histórias, não foi só a Alice que virou história, viu? Alice sorriu e continuou: Só que o mais legal de tudo eu não te contei Narizinho... Você já notou que Lúcia é quase um anagrama de Alice? Você podia se chamar Aluci, como Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a música dos Beatles, também um jogo caleidoscópico que brinca com o pais das maravilhas, numa viagem em um barco em um rio com árvores de tangerina e céus de marmelada. Podemos então juntas embarcar nessa aventura psicodélica duas meninas com olhos de caleidoscópio! Narizinho riu. Além disso temos a mesma idade, não é? Você viveu suas aventuras debaixo da terra, eu, debaixo das águas. Será que somos também como reflexos invertidos num espelho mágico? Narizinho completou: Lembro que em algum momento dos seus livros você se pergunta: será que existe um livro sobre mim? Deve haver... E eu agora te pergunto: Será que alguém escreveu essa nossa história e será que alguém está lendo exatamente nesse momento essa nossa conversa? Ou será que isso tudo é na verdade um grande sonho? - E se for, quem estará sonhando?

Notas

1 - Mestranda no curso “Interunidades – Estética e História da Arte” / USP. Orientação de Kátia Canton. Presidente da Sociedade Lewis Carroll do Brasil.
2 - CARROLL, Lewis. Alice no País das Maravilhas. Tradução e adaptação: Monteiro Lobato. Companhia Editora Nacional, 1931. 1a. ed.
3 - Ver PELIANO, Adriana. Alice’s Adventures on the Yellow Woodpecker Ranch.
4 - LOBATO, Monteiro. Reinações de Narizinho. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1931. 1a Ed.
5 - LOBATO, Monteiro. Reinações de Narizinho. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense: 1981. p. 10
6 - Alice no País das Maravilhas, capítulo 1, Livre tradução.
7 - LOBATO, A menina do narizinho arrebitado. São Paulo: Companhia editora Nacional, 1920. 1a. Ed.
8 - CARROLL, Lewis. Aventuras de Alice. Tradução e organização de Sebastião Uchôa Leite. São Paulo: Summus, 1980.
9 - “A maioria dos livros infantis de Lobato se ambientava no Sítio do Picapau Amarelo, localizado no interior do Brasil, tendo como personagens a senhora da fazenda, Dona Benta, seus netos, Narizinho e Pedrinho, e a cozinheira, Tia Nastácia. A esses personagens foram integradas entidades criadas ou animadas pela imaginação das crianças na história: a boneca irreverente e debochada Emília, o aristocrático e livresco boneco de sabugo de milho Visconde de Sabugosa, a vaca Mocha, o burro Conselheiro, o porco Rabicó e o rinoceronte Quindim. As aventuras, no entanto, em sua maioria, se passam em outros lugares: num mundo de fantasia inventado pelas crianças ou em estórias contadas por Dona Benta no começo da noite.” In. PELIANO, Adriana. (2009)

10 - Ver COELHO, Nelly Novaes (1982) p. 359.

11 - A menina do narizinho arrebitado, lançado no Natal de 1920, é o primeiro livro infantil de autoria de Monteiro Lobato.A vasta obra infantil de Lobato foi mais tarde reunida numa coleção de 17 volumes.

12 - in. Fábulas. LOBATO, Monteiro. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.
13 - Reúne seis das onze histórias que Monteiro Lobato escreveu a partir de 1920. Narizinho arrebitado é a primeira delas. Neste livro, surge Emília, a boneca de pano que destrava a língua e começam as aventuras sem fim dos netos de Dona Benta.
14 - O Saci é um personagem bastante conhecido do folclore brasileiro. O Saci é um negro jovem de uma só perna, portador de uma carapuça sobre a cabeça que lhe confere poderes mágicos. O primeiro escritor a se voltar para a figura do Saci-Pererê foi Monteiro Lobato.
15 - O Curupira é uma figura do folclore brasileiro. Ele é uma entidade das matas, um anão de cabelos compridos e vermelhos, cuja característica principal são os pés virados para trás.
É um mito antigo no Brasil, já citado por José de Anchieta, em 1560. Protege a floresta e os animais, espantando os caçadores que não respeitam as leis da natureza.
16 - A mula-sem-cabeça é um personagem do folclore brasileiro. Na maioria dos contos, é uma forma de assombração de uma mulher que foi amaldiçoada por Deus por seus pecados, e condenada a se transformar em uma criatura descrita como tendo a forma de um equino sem a cabeça que vomita fogo.
17 - “Pirolito que bate bate, / Pirulito que já bateu, / Quem gosta de mim é ela, / Quem gosta dela sou eu.” Versão original de tradição oral. (“Pirolito que bate bate / Pirolito que já bateu, / Quem adora o Marques é ela, / quem adora Emília sou eu.” (Monteiro Lobato, Narizinho arrebitado)
18 - “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky!” (Nursery Rhyme) “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky!” (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland).
19 - LOBATO, Monteiro. A Chave do Tamanho. São Paulo: editora brasiliense, 2003.
20 - In. LOBATO, Monteiro. Reinações de Narizinho. Editora Brasiliense, São Paulo: 1981.
21 - In. LOBATO, Monteiro. Viagem ao Céu. Editora Brasiliense, São Paulo: 1981.
22 - In. LOBATO, Monteiro. Reinações de Narizinho. Editora Brasiliense, São Paulo: 1981.
23 - SEVCENKO, Nicolau. in. CARROLL, Lewis. Alice no país das maravilhas. Tradução de Nicolau Sevcenko. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009.

24 - CAMPOS, Paulo Mendes. O Colunista do Morro. Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1965.

Filha de Octalles Marcondes Ferreira, Cléo, na foto com Lobato, inspiraria personagens da sua obra.

Bibliografia Consultada

AZEVEDO, Carmen Lucia de; CAMARGOS, Márica; SACCHETTA, Vladimir. Monteiro Lobato: Furacão na Botocundia. São Paulo: Editora SENAC São Paulo, 1997.
CAMPOS, Paulo Mendes. O Colunista do Morro. Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1965.
CANTON, Kátia & PELIANO, Adriana. Lewis Carroll na Era Vitoriana: Outras histórias de Alice. São Paulo: DCL, 2010.
CARROLL, Lewis. GARDNER, Martin. ALICE: Edição Comentada. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2002.
CARROLL, Lewis. Aventuras de Alice. Tradução e organização de Sebastião Uchôa Leite. São Paulo: Summus, 1980.
CARROLL, Lewis. Alice no país das maravilhas. Tradução de Nicolau Sevcenko. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009.
CARROLL, Lewis. Alice no país das maravilhas. Tradução de Ana Maria Machado. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1997.
LAJOLO, Marisa e CECCANTINI, João Luís. Monteiro Lobato livro a livro - obra infantil. São Paulo: editora Unesp, 2008.
LOBATO, Monteiro. A Chave do Tamanho. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.

LOBATO, Monteiro. Fábulas. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.

LOBATO, Monteiro. Memórias da Emília. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.

LOBATO, Monteiro. O Picapau Amarelo. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.
LOBATO, Monteiro. Reinações de Narizinho. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1955.

COELHO, Nelly Novaes. A literatura infantil. São Paulo: Quíron, Global, 1982.
PELIANO, Adriana. Diário de uma Alice. http://brasillewiscarroll.blogspot.com
PELIANO, Adriana. Alice’s Adventures on the Yellow Woodpecker Ranch. Knight letter. The Lewis Carroll Society of North America. Winter 2009. Volume II. Issue 13. Number 83.

Leia também: Aventuras de Alice no Sítio do Picapau Amarelo, por Adriana Peliano.

aMAZEd

2010-08-28T21:22:00.001-07:00

James Jean

Alice por Talita Hoffmann

2010-08-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

"De que serve um livro sem figuras e nem diálogos?" Alice

Talita Hoffmann redesenha a história de Alice, brincando com as palavras e as imagens num lindo projeto gráfico. As imagens transbordam para dentro do texto, que cria curvas de movimento e conta as aventuras de Alice dando ritmo às intenções da história e fazendo o texto dançar na página, num mágico quebra cabeça. As experiências de Carroll com o rabo do rato são o ponto de partida para uma grande brincadeira de linguagem. Essas ilustrações parecem simples e infantis a primeira vista mas dialogam com múltiplas referências estéticas dos quadrinhos, da cultura popular, da história do livro infantil ilustrado, entre outros. Elas me lembram as ilustrações do próprio Lewis Carroll, que parecem primitivas, mas revelam grande expressividade e poesia, num jogo entre delicadeza e estranhamento.

Talita Hoffman redraws the story of Alice, playing with words and imagens in a beautiful graphic design. The images overflow into the text, which creates motion curves and tells the story giving a rhythm in the intentions and doing the text dance on the page in a magical puzzle. His illustrations seem simple and childish at first sight but dialogue with multiple aesthetics references of comics, popular culture, among others. They remind me of the illustrations of Lewis Carroll himself, who seem primitive, but show great expressiveness and poetry, in a game between delicacy and surprise.

SITE OF THE ARTIST

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing

2010-08-10T13:35:00.003-07:00

By Lewis Carroll

On Stamp-Cases
Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous”. The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland”. Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.

How to Begin a Letter
If the Letter is to be in answer to another, begin by getting out that other letter and reading it through, in order to refresh your memory, as to what it is you have to answer, and as to your correspondent’s present address (otherwise you will be sending your letter to his regular address in London, though he has been careful in writing to give you his Torquay address in full).

How to Go On With a Letter
Here is a golden Rule to begin with. Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule! A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly.

How To End a Letter
If doubtful whether to end with “yours faithfully”, or “yours truly”, or “your most truly”, &c. (there are at least a dozen varieties, before you reach “yours affectionately”), refer to your correspondent’s last letter, and make your winding-up at least as friendly as his: in fact, even if a shade more friendly, it will do no harm!

On Registering Correspondence
Let me recommend you to keep a record of Letters Received and Sent. I have kept one for many years, and have found it of the greatest possible service, in many ways.

Found HERE

Some letters from Lewis Carroll:

Rebus letter to Ina

To Gertrude

Para Gertrude Chataway

Life, what is it but a dream?

2010-08-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking Glass, 1872)

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —
Long had paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

Ao sol segue o barco em frente.
Lento desliza, sonhadoramente,
Inclinando-se à voga na corrente.
Caras ciranças, um trio a escutar,
Excitamento e brilho em seu olhar
Por tão singelo conto a palpitar.
Longe se vai aquele céu dourado,
Eco que esmorece, do passado:
Ao sol de estio, sucede outono e enfado.
Sempre me perseguindo essa lembança.
Alice, sombra no céu que não se alcança,
Nunca visya por olhos sem esperança.
Contudo, vejo-as ainda a palpitar,
Em seus rostos acesos este olhar
Luzindo de avidez ao escutar.
Imagens de um país das maravilhas,
Distantes neste sonho onde o sol brilha,
Distante sonho onde o verão se estilha.
Elas deslizam ao longe, no entressonho,
Lentamente sobre um céu risonho...
Longe. A vida o que é, senão um sonho?

Tradução Sebastião Uchôa Leite