There was so much I enjoyed as a
child: Thomas the Tank Engine, Noddy (I admit it), Grimms’ Fairy Tales (I found Andersen a bit
tame), Peter Rabbit, Winnie-the-Pooh, Tales of King Arthur, The Wind in the Willows. I’m afraid that the
Bible doesn’t feature in that list: we weren’t that kind of family. But as to my
all-time favourites, there’s no question. It’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. To me these will always be the great masterpieces of children's literature.
Today I
was idly thumbing through books in a local charity shop (I know, I know…I’m
supposed to be downsizing). To my delight, there for the price of a pint of
beer was Alberto Manguel’s collection of essays A
Reader on Reading. I’d come across enthusiastic reviews of his book The Library at Night but I’d
never read him for myself. I opened the book and off the page leaped one of
John Tenniel’s timeless illustrations to Alice,
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (What would Alice
be without those graphic engravings that so perfectly captured the essence of the
books?)
I started reading about the
influence Alice had had on Alberto’s
childhood, how ‘Wonderland’ and ‘Looking-Glass Land’ became metaphors
of his life as a writer and a man. And I thought: yes, that’s me too. Not in
a very conscious way, and certainly not understood with the kind of insight
with which Manguel writes – at least, in the couple of chapters I’ve read so far.
But it prompted me to pay my own tribute to Alice. This year is the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of Alice
in Wonderland. And there is local interest too, for Lewis Carroll was brought up at
Croft-on-Tees at the very gate of County Durham where his father was incumbent
of the parish.
What was it about Alice that I responded to as a child? I wrote a blog at Christmas (scroll down to 24 Dec 2014) about the 'Alice' windows at Fenwick's in Newcastle and touched on this. Maybe I loved the elusiveness of
the stories, the sense of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ with which Carroll
constantly teases his young readers. They seemed to stretch my imagination in
ways that made other children’s literature feel wooden by comparison. In a world
where nothing is quite what it seems (which happens to be universe we live in),
metaphor, analogy and symbolism are everything.
Carroll often touches on the nature of language, most famously when Humpty Dumpty outlines his theory of
language in which he decides what
words will mean. ‘Jabberwocky’ is nonsense but it’s also not-nonsense: in its chaotic
jumble of sounds, you feel there could be a meaning just over some horizon that
it’s your own fault you can’t grasp. And then (and this is where Manguel’s book
begins) there is Alice lost in a forest of forgetfulness where nothing
has a name. The image is straight out of Dante walking in his dark wood not
knowing which way to go, but Carroll makes it entirely his own. I remember
feeling chilled when I used to read that chapter in Looking
Glass and the sense of relief when we emerged on the other side.
I wrote ‘we’ just then. For yes,
this wasn’t just Alice’s adventure. It was mine too – it must have been, or I
wouldn’t have felt so implicated in her fortunes. And that seems to me to be what
makes great literature. You find yourself drawn into the story so that you
become part of it. It’s a commonplace to say that this was what made Jesus’s parables
so memorable. Whether it’s the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus or (for
me especially) the Prodigal Son, it’s as if you are there. These stories are not about someone else. They are about you.
Perhaps I was already feeling for
the themes that I came to explore in adulthood. I read mathematics and philosophy,and then theology at university. Philosophy tutors would sometimes invoke Alice to illustrate key themes:
linguistic analysis, ideas, meaning, perception, personal identity, metaphysics and logic are all there but artlessly, as if Carroll was not really aware of what he was doing. The theological dimensions of Alice are less explored but they too
would be a fertile field for study, for example transcendence and immanence, the
nature and destiny of the human being, the quest for meaning, authenticity and
happiness, eschatology or the last things. My wife is an analytic psychotherapist, and thanks to her I can now
see in Alice echoes a-plenty of Freud’s ego, super-ego and id, and of Jung’s archetypes.
Maybe Alice’s constant experience
of disorientation and reorientation has something to say not only to individuals but also to society. No doubt Alice is
a looking-glass in which there are many reflections, but one of them is no doubt his
own society going through the painful throes of industrialisation. Perhaps we
can see our own collective condition reflected there too. Which is to say that
while so much children’s literature feels like a flight away from a complex and
often painful reality, Alice takes us
right into its heart.
Alberto Manguel ends his introduction with this: ‘In the
midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change, and
the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort,
readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as
real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage
through the dark and nameless wood.’
Looking back, I think this may
have been what it did for me. And yet, in a way that was always playful and expectant,
as if to say: you will eventually reach that beautiful garden. You will make it to the
eighth square of the chessboard. Just persevere to the end. Travel in hope. ‘A
man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ wrote Carroll’s Victorian
contemporary Robert Browning. This is Christian hope.
