The Hunting of Alice in Seven Fits

© Adriana Peliano

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.
Footnotes are missing.

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

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

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

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