Who is Alice and What is She to You?

The rub is that any work of nonsense abounds with so many inviting symbols that you can start with any assumption you please about the author and easily build up an impressive case for it. - Martin Gardner from The Annotated Alice

That's something quite a few people need to be told nowadays. In college, I heard it said that interpretive theories applied to works of fiction are not meant to be absolute claims about the works or their creators but a separate creative exercise in themselves. Most people don't seem to hold this view, though, particularly students who quickly turned their analytic fervour into grist for the internet mill. Most infamously. these interpretive frameworks have been used to justify calling authors or directors racist or sexist or homophobic. But this thing can take many forms, like the saddeningly popular YouTube video where a man "explains" Twin Peaks is entirely about Lynch's deconstruction of popular television.

The quote from The Annotated Alice continues:

Consider, for example, the scene in which Alice seizes the end of the White King's pencil and begins scribbling for him. In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations.

Alice is invisible to the White Chess King but so much bigger than him that she can easily lift him in the air between her thumb and forefinger. What could one say? Let's see. Patriarchs are controlled by invisible women. A childish instinct ultimately controls the hands of absolute rulers. A king's subconscious preoccupation with children influences his decisions. If we take the pencil as phallic, we could say the libido is too gigantic and invisible for a king to resist when crafting legislation. We could say that any Royal position is in reality no more than a figurative game piece operated by an arbitrary power. It could simply be an indication of how all the creatures Alice encounters in her dream are extensions of her own will, or we might say that all administrative figures in life are reflections of the common will.

That's seven interpretations in four minutes, Gardner! Booya!

I got a new copy of The Annotated Alice on Sunday. I was so happy to see it. My old copy is in a box back in San Diego but I could justify the new purchase because this is the updated and expanded 150th anniversary edition. I really wanted it to show to teachers and students here in Japan where Alice is mainly known for the Disney films. Most people don't seem to be aware of the original books.

This new edition was expanded and updated by Mark Burnstein who's taken up the torch since Gardner passed away in 2010. It features many more colour illustrations from various editions of the Alice books from the past 150 years.

Above images by Iassn Ghiuselev, Peter Blake, Arthur Rackham.

Invocations of Rule 42

It's hard to believe Disney's 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland is only an hour and fifteen minutes long. Not merely because it had more songs written for it than any other Disney film to date--over thirty songs!--but because it doesn't feel like a single film but like a series of short films. This is part of what's generally considered its greatest flaw, by its critics and by Walt Disney himself, that there were too many cooks in the kitchen so the film lacks a cohesive narrative. Yet it remains perhaps the most influential adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ever made and easily overshadows Tim Burton's big budget adaptation from a few years ago (and its swiftly forgotten sequel). Both Burton's and the 1951 version miss crucial aspects of Lewis Carroll's books but Burton's film goes a step further to carry a message of empowerment in direct opposition to the attitude of the original work. Frequently considered a parody of Oxford scholars and faculty of his time, Carroll's Alice books lampoon the self-seriousness and absurdity of the adult world while Burton's film ends with Alice taking a place of prominence firmly within that world. The 1951 film, for presenting a series of effective shorts, falls closer to Carroll's work by default except in scenes where an attempt is made to force some kind of arc on Alice. The "Very Good Advice" sequence, with a song that expands on a line from the book, is very good and sweet in isolation, but in the context of the film as a whole comes off as somewhat bizarre. Nothing in the Dee and Dum sequence or the Made Tea Party sequence had led us to believe that Alice was on the kind of devastating track of tragic hubris that would seem to justify a bitterly self-reflective song like that.

Alice growing in the Queen's court later on seems to have been changed in the 1951 film for a similar purpose. She eats the mushroom to grow large in an effort to escape her absurd persecutors but once she finds herself in a position of dominance she can't help but heap petty insults on the Queen: "And as for you, 'Your Majesty'--Your Majesty indeed! Why, you're not a Queen! You're just a fat, pompous, bad tempered old tyrant!" With each invective, Alice shrinks until she finishes up smaller than everyone else in the court. It's an amusing moment that clearly says something about the importance of remaining gracious when one is in a position of power but the book's version of the scene comes from a more effective idea.

Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so.’ said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Alice very meekly: ‘I’m growing.’

‘You’ve no right to grow here,’ said the Dormouse.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Alice more boldly: ‘you know you’re growing too.’

‘Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,’ said the Dormouse: ‘not in that ridiculous fashion.’ And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court.

Alice becomes more confident in how she speaks to the court but she remains essentially polite. The transition is more subtle and the effect resolves into Alice finding herself at her natural size in relation to a pack of cards at the moment she wakes up, the impression being similar to the nonsense of a dream slowly resolving itself into reality. At the same time, though, the idea that Alice can't help but naturally be larger than a court contrived of abstract rules and senseless rhetorical manoeuvres has a very effective subtext. It's not that Alice is trying to make herself bigger, she simply can't help it--and, of course, the idea that a young girl might be more reasonable than a card Queen obsessed with who stole the tarts directly in front of her seems inevitable.

I've written about the Alice books a lot in my blog over the years and I've sought as many film adaptations as I could. None of them really get it totally right--my favourites are the Jonathan Miller version and the Jan Svankmajer version, the former because of how much dialogue it directly imports from the books to be delivered by great actors, and the latter because of how Svankmajor digests the themes of the books to create something very much his own. But I'll always love the 1951 Disney version, mainly as an example of what a great animation studio Disney used to be. It's a kind of 2D animated storytelling you don't see anymore and watching it makes Disney's recent Forces of Destiny shorts even more depressing.

This is all kind of on my mind to-day because of the Wrinkle in Time movie which I don't plan on seeing. The trailers look like Skittles commercials and many of the reviews remind me of exactly the problem I had with Burton's Alice in Wonderland--a lot of people are saying the film has almost the opposite message to the books. I read the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, but not since then, so I only dimly remember them. What I mainly remember is that, compared to other books I read at the time, they had a remarkably cold quality, and I remember a lot of impressions of the lead character alone in some kind of dark and hostile realm. Nothing like the unremarkable candy riot trailers I've seen.