Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (prod. Walt Disney; dir David Hand et al, 1937)

[Note: this is the first of a series of posts about the first five feature-length animated Disney films, 1937-42, written to help get my thoughts in order about the significance of Disney moviemaking as core 'children's literature' texts of the 20th-century. The blogposts are, accordingly, all rather unfinished, these posts: I'm groping my way towards conclusions without fretting too much about crossing all the conceptual 't's and dotting all the interpretive, er, lower-case 'j's. In writing them I also take it as axiomatic that these films are key 20th-century texts of 'childhood', and by and large avoid the more obvious Adorno-Horkheimer Culture-Industry critique of them. Not because such critique is irrelevant, mind. The Disney corporation has been extraordinarily and globally successful, commercially speaking, in large part because it has proved itself so adept at the reification and commodification of children's entertainment. But for the time being I am more interested in Disney as art, which it clearly is; and these films as a series of symbolicially rich and eloquent articulations of children's experience. Which they clearly are.]


Neal Gabler [Walt Disney: the Biography (Random House 2006)] suggests that Walt Disney had ‘deep-seated psychological reasons’ for choosing the ‘Snow White’ story as the subject for his—and the world’s—first feature-length animated cartoon.

Snow White had nearly all the narrative features—the tyrannical parent, the sentence of drudgery, the promise of a childhood utopia—and incorporated nearly all the major themes of his young life, primarily the need to conquer the previous generation to stake one’s claim on maturity, the rewards of hard work, the dangers of trust, and perhaps above all, the escape into fantasy as a remedy for inhospitable reality. [216]

Of course, this is only of interest insofar as Disney’s individual experience scales up to society as a whole. That the film was a success—more than a success, a phenomenal success, grossing $6.7 million in receipts by May 1939 and going on ‘to become the highest grossing American [and therefore world] film to that point, eventually surprassing the previous record-holder The Singing Fool with Al Jolson by $2 million’—this suggests that there’s something about the film that resonated with a larger audience. Gabler quotes Bettelheim (‘stories that tell about an aging parent who decides that the time has come to let the new generation take over; but before this can happen the successor must prove himself capable and worthy …’) which seems like an odd observation, both in itself, and in terms of its fit to the Wicked Queen in Snow White. But really, Gabler’s angle is biographical (he is writing a ‘biography’ after all):

Though some analysts would apply a Freudian interpretation ... and others imposed a cultural interpretation in which the film promoted Depression values of hard work and community, the cartoon would ultimately become a parable of Disney’s own young life. He was Snow White, threatened by parental jealousy and capricious power and forced into his own world, the world of animation …

Ohhh kay.

There are several things we can say about Snow White; the question is whether those several things cohere into a single reading of the text. One thing is that the success of Disney’s ‘Snow White’ was more than just the fact that a great many people, worldwide, paid to see the movie at theatres—although, of course, a great many did. But $2 million worth of Snow White toys had been sold by the end of 1938; and another $2 million of ‘Snow White handkerchiefs’ (who knew handkerchiefs were so lucrative?). This is one of the four pillars of Disney’s success—merchandising—and it is striking that it was there from the beginning. Sidebar: what is the biggest grossing movie of all time? Avatar. I know that! It was a pub quiz answer I—not the right one. Oh, really? Was it Titanic, then? One of the Marvel films? Avengers: Assemble perhaps? No. No? Oh, wait, did you mean highest grossing adjusted for inflation? Gone With The Wind, then. Or the first Star Wars movie? No, again, no. Try again. Well then I don’t understand. Those films top the lists of box-office gross. Ah, but box office is only one way in which a film earns money. Add up the box-office take, DVD sales, franchise rights and—especially—toys and mechandise, and the highest grossing film of all time is …

Cars 2. Seriously.

Anyway, back on topic If ‘merchandising’ is one of the four pillars of Disney success, the others are: art; music and character. The visual component ('and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?) is clearly central, and I’ll come back to it in future posts. The music gets overlooked, in some studies of the Disney phenomenon: but it’s hard to think of songs from the 1930s and 1940s that have the presentday cultural currency as ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, ‘Heigh-Ho’, ‘Whistle While You Work’ (or for that matter: ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’, ‘Hi Diddly Dee, An Actor’s Life for Me’, or—I could go on). ‘Character’ was something Disney, perhaps surprisingly, kept forgetting. Though audiences empathised with the rather drippy Snow White, and connected emotionally with her conflict with the Queen, the move scores especially in the individuation of the dwarves—the exaggerated yet relatable separate personalities of all seven which, together, somehow aggregate into a single gestalt. That, I’d argue, are where ‘we’ are; positioned as outsider observers by the very logic of cinema itself as the love-story plays through and the beautiful young girl and the handsome young prince pair off.

And that’s the thing that interests me the most about Snow White as a movie. The dwarfs, yes; but the dwarfs as the way the film interpellates masculinity. It is a version of the world symbolically predicated upon the diminishment of maleness. The Queen, wicked as she might be, rules; the core emotional dynamic is between (quasi)-mother and daughter. The film parses 'masculinity' as the threat of violence, of death—think of the huntsman, sent by the queen to knife Snow White to death—but only to unthread it.

Scary! But of course the huntsman can't follow-through. Look what happens to him in the crucial sequence:

He shrinks! He shrinks before our very eyes to dwarfish dimensions; unmanned, we might say, by his tender heart. The very next scene is Snow White fleeing through the forest and stumbling upon the dwarfs. And from that moment on, until the final scenes with the perfectly blank manikin figure of the handsome prince, it is the dwarfs who carry the ‘maleness’ of the movie. They are, clearly, men—not boys—but they are also childish in stature and in terms of their relationship to Snow White. Infatuated with her, yes: but her bed is not a place for them—the bedboard keeps them all neatly at bay, their variously grotesque penile noses the only things daring to reach past the line of demarcation.

What is all this saying about manhood? Well, we could read it a number of ways. Maybe the point is a subtle undermining of the patriarchal dominance of 1930s US society, but that's a hard case to make stick. After all, one central thrust of the movie is really rather ostentatiously to establish a gendered division of labour. Snow White works hard, but works exclusively at domestic chores; demonstrating, indeed, her fitness for marriage by showing herself super-skilled at the housework. The dwarfs may be small, but they do manly work in a manly way: digging in the mines and so on. Indeed, they bring out so many and such colossal gemstones it's a bit puzzling they all have to share a small rural cottage: they could surely afford a mansion and many servants. But wondering why they don't do so is to open a hermeutic door we probably don't want to open. This land, wherever it is, clearly lacks almost all the infrastructure a functioning society would need. (See also Anne Bilson's excellent blog on the movie, including her livetweeting her viewing of the movie: 'If one of the dwarves is a Doc, how come he’s working down mines & not operating on people? What kind of Khmer Rouge regime is this anyway?')

The broader point is that, in Steven Watts' excellent The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (1997), 'Walt Disney operated not only as an entertainer but as a historical mediator … this role was unintentional but decisive. Disney entertainment projects were consistently nourished by connections to mainstream American culture—its aesthetics, political ideology, social structures, economic framework, moral principles—as it took shape from the late 1920s through to the later 1960s' [xx]. Perhaps we want to read the film's core shrinkage of maleness as an expression of cultural anxiety; or as a playful sense that 'we' no longer need to be the stuffy post-Victorian embodiments of maturity any more. Which is another way of talking about a broader encroaching infantilising of men, leading us from Men to today's overwhelming prevalence of man-boys. Then again, the dwarfs do seem to be having all sorts of playful, childlike fun. And meanwhile, the older woman is passing to the younger woman the Improbably Bright Scarlet Globe of Sexual Allure And Power ('As Used By Scarlet Women Everywhere!'), bypassing the male characters altogether.

WARNING! Improbably Bright Scarlet Globe of Sexual Allure And Power may cause temporary death. This is nothing to be worried about, and is in fact only 'la petite mort', from which you will awake refreshed and, in some cases, married.

Peter Pan (1902-11)

Post-Disney, ‘Peter Pan’ is a name rather tainted with ‘cuteness’ cooties, I suppose. And if we translate it into its root forms we get: ‘Rock Pagan’, which sounds like the name of the lead singer of an epically naff US Heavy Metal band. Something has gone awry. What happened to the Pan in Peter Pan?

There are three main Barrie versions of Peter Pan. In the first, he is as a seven-day-old half-bird, half-human creature flying around Kensington Gardens: this is in chapters 13–18 of Barrie’s adult novel The Little White Bird (1902; these chapters were excerpted and republished in 1906 as a standalone, with nice Arthur Rackham illustrations, under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens). Then there was the stage play, the celebrated and for many core representation: Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (first performed 27 Dec 1904, and a big hit). Finally there is the novelisation of that play, Peter Pan and Wendy (1911). I’d like to say something about the play, and maybe I’ll get around to that some day; but its copyright status is tricky (see here under this entry on ‘perpetual copyright’), and I’m going to stick with the novel for the time being.

The question, then, is 'why Peter Pan?'. And perhaps it is not that surprising that the Disney clean-cut young lad or the girl-actor-in-green-tights-and-tunic versions of ‘Peter Pan’ have overwritten older apperceptions of the god. The crucial thing about Peter is that he is a child; he is, indeed, always a child (moreover the only child who will never be troubled with puberty). Remind me of the famous opening line of Peter and Wendy? Oh, that's right: ‘All children, except one, grow up.’ Pan, on the other hand, is the goat-cocked god of adult appetites such as drinking wine and hearty bestiality.

That’s a statue from the rectangular peristyle Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, and therefore pre-79.AD in provenance. But, golly, that’s an arresting image though, isn’t it? Not even Rock Pagan would get up to that, in a suite of the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile, no matter how much coke he'd snorted. Could anything be further from our sense of what ‘Peter Pan’ represents? Something odd is going on here.

One way to understand what that ‘something’ is would be to excavate the modern English resurgence of interest in Pan. This, it turns out, has two phases. First there is an 18th century revival of interest in Pan as a phallic god (probably non-coincidentally, 1757 was when that Herculaneum statue, above, was excavated). Richard Payne Knight published his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus in 1786. Knight explores a variety of fascinating highways and byways of the worship of Priapus, tracing its spectral presence in the Christian era (chapters include ‘Scotland, and its Phallic celebrations’; ‘Phallic figures on public buildings’; ‘Ireland, and its Shelah-na-Gig’; ‘Horseshoes nailed to stable doors, a remain of the Shelah-na-Gig’; ‘The ancient god Priapus becomes a saint in the Middle Ages’; ‘Robin Goodfellow’; ‘Easter, and hot-cross-buns’; ‘May-day festivities, and the May-pole’; ‘Bonfires’; ‘Lady Godiva, the Shrewsbury show, and the Guild festival at Preston’; ‘The Knights Templars’ … wait, what was that about hot cross buns?). But the main thing Knight does is trace all this back to Pan. Originally ‘worship of generative and nutritive, powers of the Deity’ focussed on animals, especially bulls. But:

The Greeks, as they advanced in the cultivation of the imitative arts, gradually changed the animal for the human form, preserving still the original character. The human head was at first added to the body of the bull; but afterwards the whole figure was made human, with some of the features, and general character of the animal, blended with it. Oftentimes, however, these mixed figures had a peculiar and proper meaning, like that of the Vatican Bronze; and were not intended as mere refinements of art. Such are the fawns and satyrs, who represent the emanations of the Creator, incarnate with man, acting as his angels and ministers in the work of universal generation. In copulation with the goat, they represent the reciprocal incarnation of man with the deity, when incorporated with universal matter: for the Deity, being both male and female, was both active and passive in procreation; first animating man by an emanation from his own essence, and then employing that emanation to reproduce, in conjunction with the common productive powers of nature, which are no other than his own prolific spirit transfused through matter. [35]

Not sure about that; but OK—Pan.

These mixed beings are derived from Pan, the principle of universal order; of whose personified image they partake. Pan is addressed in the Orphic Litanies as the first-begotten love, or creator incorporated in universal matter, and so forming the world. Lycæan Pan was the most ancient and revered God of the Arcadians, the most ancient people of Greece

The Greek ‘Pan’ means, ‘all’, of course.

According to Plutarch, the Jupiter Ammon of the Africans was the same as the Pan of the Greeks. This explains the reason why the Macedonian kings assumed the horns of that god. The case is, that Pan, or Ammon, being the universe, and Jupitera title of the Supreme God (as will be shown hereafter),the horns, the emblems of his power, seemed the properest symbols of that supreme and universal dominion to which they all, as well as Alexander, had the ambition to aspire.

See also: the horns on the brow of Moses. Now this is exactly the sort of thing we are today deeply uncomfortable associating with childhood, except that Knight’s Pan must be a ‘youth’, since he represents new life, the rebirth of the cosmos after the death of the year. Perhaps we are happiest thinking of this in more abstract terms, as ‘the piper at the gates of dawn’ rather than (to quote Knight one last time) ‘Pan pouring water upon the organ of generation; that is, invigorating the active creative power by the prolific element.’

I mention the Piper, there, for obvious reasons: Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. The novel postdates the first appearance of Barrie’s Peter Pan by a couple of years, but Grahame had been meditating upon ‘Pan’ long before his fellow Scot. Grahame’s first book, Pagan Papers (1893) includes this essay on ‘The Rural Pan’. Here are its opening three paragraphs:

Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin) bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins to blow a clearer note.

When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities will abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this that flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the day? Mercury is out -- some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed banks crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his wake is marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and fragments of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to embrace the slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the full gaze of the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime reposeth, passively beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards' Club at Maidenhead. Here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity subjectively inclined, he is neither objective nor, it must be said for him, at all objectionable, like them of Mercury.

Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of Streatley Hill, "annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade''; or better yet, pushing an explorer's prow up the remote untravelled Thames, till Dorchester's stately roof broods over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping. Southwards, again, on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and jostling; dust that is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither comes the young Apollo, calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth certain Mercuries of the baser sort, who do him obeisance, call him captain and lord, and then proceed to skin him from head to foot as thoroughly as the god himself flayed Marsyas in days of yore, at a certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good instance of Time's revenges. And yet Apollo returns to town and swears he has had a grand day. He does so every year. Out of hearing of all the clamour, the rural Pan may be found stretched on Ranmore Common, loitering under Abinger pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the sinuous Mole, abounding in friendly greetings for his foster-brothers the dab-chick and water-rat.

When these paragraphs are written Wind in the Willows is still a decade and a half away, but Dawngate scene is here in nascent form. The difference is one of whom occupies centre stage—in the earlier book, Pan; in the later book the mole and water-rat. The chapter ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (from which Pink Floyd took the title for their first album, thereafter rendering the phrase forever hippy, weed-scented and a bit naff) reinscribes the encounter:

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me," whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. "Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend, and saw him at his side, cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

"Rat!" he found breath to whisper, shaking. "Are you afraid?"

"Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!"

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

This is a vision of Nature as the vehicle of the Numinous from which all specifically phallic reference has been carefully removed (though I do wonder about the artfully positioned vine in that Paul Bransom illustration, there: the frontispiece to the 1913 edition, no less). Grahame's is the inheritor of Knight’s ‘pantheist’ Pan, but there’s nothing mischievous about him; nothing playful, lustful, goatish (there's nothing mischievous, either, about Machen's monstrous 'Great God Pan' (1890), although there's plenty that's shudderworthy, not to say horrible and misogynistic). We might wonder why Ransome's figure is half-goat at all. (In a related datum: Rock Pagan, we all know, played woodwind, uncredited, on Pink Floyd’s first album).

[Addendum: students in seminar discussion raised two interesting related facts. One, that the first Narnian encountered by any of the children in Lewis's could-hardly-be-more-Christian Lion/Witch/Wardrobe is the Pan-ish faun, Mr Tumnus; who beguiles Lucy back to his home where he drugs her with tea. Very odd. Two, that Lyra's demon in Dark Materials is called 'Pan'. A series of books about, in the final analysis, killing God.]

I’m not sure this brings us any nearer to an answer to the ‘why Peter Pan?’ question. I’ve gone on too long (and not for the first time), so I’ll wrap up with two related points. One has to do with Captain Hook—played on the stage, according to the venerable tradition inaugurated by Barrie himself, by the same actor who plays Wendy’s father. I leave the ‘Oedipal reading’ as an exercise for the reader. Instead I want to suggest a different interpretation of this figure: with his splendid hat, and his hook-for-a-right-hand, and his inexhaustible energy and vigour that is, somehow, intimately tied to the being-in-the-world of Pan himself. Here’s Richard Payne Knight one last time:

We find on the medals of Melita [a representation of Priapus] who seems by his attitude to be brooding over something. On his head is the cap of liberty, whilst in his right hand he holds the hook or attractor, and in his left the winnow or separator, so that he probably represents Ἐρως, or generative spirit brooding over matter.

Maybe Hook is a type of Ἐρως, though Barrie also positions him as a malign anti-Priapus, existing in a poised opposition to the pro-Priapus of Peter himself.

But there’s something more directly relevant, I think. The thing about Pan is that he’s the only god to have died in our time. Gods don’t die; that’s what ‘immortal’ (a synonym for ‘god’) means—indeed, that’s pretty much all it means in the Greek and Roman pantheons, where gods are otherwise exactly as petty and moody and selfish as the worst of humanity. So what happened with Pan? Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum (c. AD 100) relates how a sailor voyaging to Italy at some point during the time of the Emperor Tiberius (AD 14–37), and passing the island of Paxi, heard a voice booming across the water: ‘Thamus, art thou there? When you reach Palodes be sure to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.’ Thamus did so, and the news was greeted from shore with groans and laments.

In Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, the cry ‘Great Pan is dead’ becomes an ecstatic celebration of the Christian succession to diabolic Paganism. But one thing Barrie’s Peter Pan clearly isn’t, is an ecstatic celebration of Christianity. It is, however, a famous expression of the tendency of the young to laugh in the face of personal extinction. To die, Pan declares gloriously, would be an awfully big adventure.

"Pan, who and what art thou?" [Hook] cried huskily.

"I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture,

In the movie adaptations, Hook doesn’t share his existential bravery—a ludicrous gibbering coward in the Disney film, a desperate old man in the rather good 2003 movie (‘old, alone, done-for!’). He’s not like that in the original story; on the contrary, he meets death bravely and with honour (the only thing that scares him, were told, is the sight of his own blood, which is ‘an unusual colour’). In his final battle with Pan, he actually undergoes a kind of symbolic rejuvenation, returning to his days as an Eton schoolboy—and doing so, as it were, ‘fittingly’:

Hook was fighting now without hope. That passionate breast no longer asked for life; but for one boon it craved: to see Peter show bad form before it was cold forever.

… What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he was, we may be glad, without sympathising with him, that in the end he was true to the traditions of his race. The other boys were flying around him now, flouting, scornful; and he staggered about the deck striking up at them impotently, his mind was no longer with them; it was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up [to the headmaster] for good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right.

James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell.

For we have come to his last moment.

Seeing Peter slowly advancing upon him through the air with dagger poised, he sprang upon the bulwarks to cast himself into the sea. He did not know that the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little mark of respect from us at the end.

He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter kick instead of stab.

At last Hook had got the boon for which he craved

"Bad form," he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.

Thus perished James Hook.

Stop a bit: go back to the novel’s opening sentence. ‘All children, except one, grow up.’ That’s not true though, is it? Or to be more precise: it’s true only from the perspective of adulthood. A roomful of adults can say to one another, ‘well, we all grew up, didn’t we? That was an inevitable part of our life.’ But that’s not the way the matter presents to children themselves; and surely its children whose perspective should predominate in a case such as this? Not all children grow up. Barrie knew this better than most.

When he was 6 years old, Barrie's next-older brother David (his mother's favourite) died two days before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions, even wearing David's clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time Barrie entered her room, and heard her say "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to", wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'" Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. [Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys (Constable, 1979; revised edition, Yale University Press, 2004)]

Everybody knows that the closest thing we have to an ‘Alice Liddell’ original for Peter Pan, George Davies, died in the Trenches barely out of his teens. Everybody knows that Barrie had no children of his own; that his own marriage was almost certainly unconsummated. But more relevant, I think, than biographical data, is the larger context. One thing reading into the 18th and 19th-century grounds of Childrens’ Literature does for you is reveal how intertwined it is with death. Eric, or Little By Little. Alice. The Water Babies. It’s the Psychic Death Klaxon. It has to do with the way this mode of literature was born out of an age when children died as a matter of course. At the moment I’m torn between different interpretations of this persistent feature of the mode. Is it that children are involved dialectically in death because they are new life? Or is it that having children entails confronting your own mortality—because howevermuch you love you kids and however earnestly you pray that you predecease them (how horrific it would be to outlive your own children!) nonetheless it is an absolutely central part of raising children that they will be loving and laughing and drinking wine in the sunshine when you yourself are cold and dead in the ground—that this, in a core sense, is the whole point of having children. Not a terribly comforting thought, no matter how awfully big the promised adventure may be. Rock Pagan's new solo album is about precisely this, as a matter of fact.

Margaret Atwood, Maddaddam (2013)

I've decided I quite like the neon-blare UK cover for Maddaddam, or 'Maddaddaddaddaddaddam' as I sometimes call it. Better than the rather drab US cover, I think.

Anyway. Previously on this blog I reviewed Maddaddam Trilogy 1 and Maddaddam Trikogy 2, in one super-long post. On this very day I round off my ruminations with a review of Maddaddam Trilogy 3, over at Strange Horizons. Go. See.

It's only partly a review about the novel itself, actually. It's also a meditation, more or less annoyingly phrased, about the embargo on 'spoilers' that increasingy overshadows genre reviews these days. This gets heavy, fairly quickly:

According to the old story, when Pandora's box was opened all the myriad evils flew out into the world except one—the lid was snapped back down just in time to keep knowledge of future events firmly sealed inside. But that's never convinced me. After all, we all eventually do obtain knowledge of future events; it's just that it often takes a while. A novel or film generates a modular version of this: we start not knowing how the story is going to develop. If I tell you ahead-of-time you feel cheated of the pleasures of finding out at your own, or more precisely finding out at the original story's, pace. Spoilers, in other words, are an offence related to impatience, a violation of Keats's negative capability. Will Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy find true love together? Won't they? Until we reach the end of Pride and Prejudice these two possible endings exist in a kind of pleasurable quantum superposition, much as Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead.

But wait a moment: Schrödinger's cat is a poor model for this. If Pride and Prejudice were a properly quantum-superposition experience we would never find out whether Elizabeth and Darcy get together. They would remain both happily married and lonely-and-apart forever. Or to put it another way, we all know how the "cat" story ends, because it's built in to the experiment. We open the box. The cat is dead. More to the point, in that feline corpse we have the way all stories end. Elizabeth and Darcy's joyous wedding day is only a way-station on the longer-term road to this inevitable, leveling truth. Asking of Pride and Prejudice "but what happens in the end?" is to beg a more fundamental question: how far along do you want to take this "in the end" business? Ultimately what happens is: Elizabeth dies. Darcy dies. This is how your story ends too, and mine.

This, I suppose, is what really infuriates us about spoilers: the way they dead-head narrative suspense. We hate this because it reminds us how fragile and temporary "narrative suspense" (day-to-day living) actually is. Spoilers are a memento mori, and that's why we deplore them. They remind us that all the shifts and strategies by which we aim to fix up the existential emptiness of our lives—anticipation, looking forward to things, wondering how it's all going to work out—ultimately come to nothing. Tomorrow is not really another day, whatever Scarlett O'Hara said. Tomorrow is today, over again. And the Platonic Form of "tomorrow," the future in (as it were) the abstract, is the same for all of us. We're all mortal, after all. Complaining noisily about spoilers is the equivalent of putting out hands over our eyes and singing la! la! la! in a loud voice when faced with this fact.

If that looks like too morbid a way of putting it, then we can swing the argument about. The medieval and renaissance fascination with the memento mori had an important and therapeutic motive behind him, one that we have—in our modern-world hysterical flight from Death, with its attendant, unhealthy fetishization of youth and novelty—forgotten. It is good to remember you must die. It puts your life in a proper perspective. In narrative terms, "anticipation" is a sugary food. "I wonder who the murderer is?" propels you twitchily through the story to the end ("oh, it was the butler") and so through to the inevitable anticlimactic deflation, when the sugar rush collapses into ennui and weariness. There are other things that might interest us in a story: to do with how the story is told, and what its broader implications are. There are things other than the crude "what is going to happen next?"

ENDER’S GAME AND PHILOSOPHY, edited by Kevin S Decker (2013)

From Plato to Ἐντερ. Over on the Arc Blog -- check it out.

Corralled Carroll

Five posts. Quietly, though! Best not wake the Duchess. You know how angry she can get.

1. Alice, What's With The Terrovision Reference It's 2013 For Crying Out Loud?

2. 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Apuleius Found There'

3. 'Up With The Smoke, And How Alice Flew'

4. Animals in Wonderland

5. Riddles, Ravens, Writing-Desks

That's all my recent Alice-books-related posts, all in one place and with a nice fence around them to keep them safe.

Alice 4: Riddles, Ravens, Writing-desks

[The last of my Alice thoughts, for now; meant to post it with the rest, last week, but one thing lead to another, which lead to another, which lead back to the one thing, after which I had to have a bit of a lie-down.]

In The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll's Mathematical Recreations (Copernicus 1996) Martin Gardner—the man whose annotations to the Alice books brought many people, myself included, to the books—recalls that he didn’t like Carroll’s writing as a kid:

As a child my greatest reading delights were the fantasies of L. Frank Baum. I tried hard to read the Alice books, but was put off by their abrupt transitions, the lack of a consistent story line, and the unpleasant characters in Alice’s two dreams. And of course I missed all of Carroll’s subtle jokes, wordplay, logic paradoxes and philosophical implications. [ix]

I was very struck by this, reading it recently: because the things Gardner lists here as putting him off as a child were precisely the things that attracted me to the Alice books when I was younger. Perhaps without realising exactly why, I responded joyfully to the way this story about escaping drab mundanity into a world characterised as much by frustration as dream-logic wish-fulfilment (the frustration is important, I think, and I’ll come back to it) was itself written in a form that flouted drab conventionality. I’m struck, too, that all these things—abrupt transitions, distrust of the ‘coherence’ of conventional plot-lead storytelling, unpleasant characters and buried games and wordplay—are in the fiction I myself write and publish. This was not a conscious decision on my part to imitate Carroll, although ‘conscious’ is a tricky word to apply to text and influence of this calibre Gardner adds that he eventually fell in love with the books as an undergraduate (‘unlike many Carrollians,’ he says, ‘I still believe that the Alice books should not be read by children, at least not by American children, until they are well into their teens.’). He goes on to highlight a number of buried riddles and gags that he thinks many people miss. ‘An example of puns so well concealed that they were long urecognized are the three ‘littles’ in the prefatory poem. They refer to the three Liddell sisters:

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.

‘The first Alice book also contains the Mad Hatter’s notorious riddle about the raven and the writing desk. Carroll confessed that he introduced the riddle without having any answer in mind, though he later supplied one: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” Carroll deliberarely misspelled “never” to make it “raven” backward.’ And again, the poem that stands as Epilogue to Looking-Glass:

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 has 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?

Famously, of course, this is an acrostic: spelling out ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL.

Actual Alice is not impressed

Now, the appeal of the Alice books depends upon the quality and resonance of their imaginative play. Play is vital, something the importance of which children grasp intuitively. Nonetheless, Gardner has a point, I think, when he implies that some kinds of play bore children. Acrostics might be one such. The more abstruse logic and metaphysics (are we all just a part of the Red King’s dream? and so on) may be another.

Whilst we’re on the subject of riddles and gags that no-one has spotted, here’s one that slipped past even Martin Gardner. In Through the Looking-Glass chapter 3 ('Looking Glass Insects') Alice wanders into the forest where nothing has a name:

She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. 'Well, at any rate it's a great comfort,' she said as she stepped under the trees, 'after being so hot, to get into the — into what?' she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. 'I mean to get under the — under the — under this, you know!' putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. 'What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name — why, to be sure it hasn't!' She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. 'Then it really has happened, after all! And how, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was, 'L, I know it begins with L!'

Here's Hugh Haughton, in the Penguin Classics 'Centenary' edition of the novel (he is following Martin Gardner's explanation): 'L is for Liddell', which is the real Alice's surname. But this is surely not right: for when she recovers her name she does not call herself 'Liddell', but 'Alice.' No, the joke is otherwise. She is in a forest, but she cannot remember it is a forest. She meets a fawn, who cannot remember it is a fawn. When it leaves the forest it does remember ('I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight, 'and, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes').

No: 'I know it begins with L!' -- What begins with an 'l' is: lice. The joke is that for a moment she thinks she is member of the lice family. Which is appropriate enough, since this is the chapter in which she has just encountered all the other Looking-Glass insects.

I like that gag, and am surprised nobody even spotted it. But that’s how the ludic element works. Maybe the issue is: it’s a gag. And maybe I’m sensitised to things like gags and riddles (two formally, and indeed semiotically, rather similar things) because I’ve just published a book on Riddles and Tolkien. And because I always like Fozzie Bear’s terrible jokes. I mean, even as a kid I understood that the point was to laugh at Fozzie, because he thinks his terrible jokes are funny; but I found them actually funny. There’s a defect in my comedy gland, I daresay. So: maybe I’m seeing riddles in my latest re-read, where the consensus is the books are actually about ‘Nonsense’.

Nonsense is certainly interesting. It has a long pedigree. Indeed, in oral form (‘Hey Diddle Diddle’) its pedigree vanished into the backward and abysm of time; but even its more scholarly and textually ludic forms can be traced—as Noel Malcolm does, in his excellent The origins of English nonsense (1998)—to Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. Carroll and Lear stand as the Beatles and Stones (or: the Tennyson and Browning; or: the Spielberg and Tim Burton; or the to sweep back around to my original analogy, the McCartney and Lennon) of English nonsense—to quote David Langford:

Carroll’s Alice books offer a kind of intellectual nonsense based on perverse ‘Read-the-Small-Print’ interpretations of logic and idiom, while Lear exploits disconcerting whimsies, non sequiturs and unexplained nonce-words like “runcible”. G K Chesterton, argued in ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ [in The Defendant (1901)] that this made Lear the superior fabulist, a view not universally shared. [Langford, ‘Nonsense’, in Clute and Grant (eds) The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), 691]

Not universally shared, indeed. It’s the difference between the fluent polish and pleasantly murderous violence of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ as against the jarring estrangements of ‘I Am The Walrus’, although in an irony that speaks neatly to my subject today, in writing this latter song Lennon was, of course, directly channelling Carroll, not Lear.

So that’s all fine and dandy; but riddles are a different matter. Riddles are sense wearing the clothes of nonsense; they’re nonsense that only appears to be nonsensical until you light upon the key, when strong sense suddenly blares forth. There are those who feel that all nonsense is like this, that once we have found the golden key that unlocks the box of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ then it will all come clear. I think the raven and the writing desk operate according to the principles of a different kind of avionic escritoire. What they have in common is a trivial matter of surface appearance—they both begin with the phoneme /r/—and all attempts to delve into deeper significance are quite deliberately derailed.

Delving in the fertile fields of Tolkien made me ponder just how deeply riddling Anglo Saxon culture was; and therefore how riddling was The Hobbit. Not just the ‘Riddles in the Dark’ chapter, but all the way through, from Bilbo’s unexpectedly riddling ‘Good morning’ (‘what do you mean? that it is a good morning, or a morning for me to be good on’ and so on) to the meaning of ‘hobbit’ itself. Indeed, I think the heart of the success of The Hobbit is the extent to which Tolkien was able to recreate an Old English or Old Norse idiom in this modern form (the children's novel). As I argue in the book, I take that culture to have been in a profound sense a 'riddling' one, ironic, playful, funny, brave in a deliberately careless way.

But it’s surely a long way from the Old English—stomping about with hessian cloaks and swords scratching at the lice in their hair—to well-dressed, well-scrubbed, ever-polite Alice. From such Old English beasts as riddling ravens (‘war-gull’ is an Anglo Saxon kenning, or riddle, for raven: grennir gunn-más “feeder of the war-gull” = “warrior”) to the writing-desks from which issued all Carroll’s other riddles. Or perhaps the vector runs the other way: from the Victorian tea-party hair and hatter of Wonderland to the Old English Haigha and Hatta of Looking Glass

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name is Haigha.' (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with 'mayor.')

Why is a raven like a writing desk? What links the riddling culture of the Anglo Saxons with the material of nineteenth-century England? Riddles themselves. Riddles are like sides of the mushroom, like the comestibles on offer down the rabbit hole. Ingest one, and it may shrink signification (just a solitary bird; just a piece of furniture). But, try another and it may make you soar, fly like a raven, generate masterpieces of literature.

Alice 3: Animals in Wonderland

I'm rather intrigued by the notion (which, I'm ashamed to confess, only recently occurred to me) that Tenniel's Alice's Caterpillar is a satirical dig at the British judiciary. Martin Gardner notes how Tenniel made the first two rows of caterpillarian legs the creature's nose and chin, which is very neat; and I remember thinking as a child how like a treble clef the curling of the hookah's line is. But to look at the image is surely to note the resemblance of the caterpillar's back to a judicial wig (Thomas Woodcock and Dominique Enright's Legal Habits: a Brief Sartorial History of Wig, Robe and Gown (2003) makes plain that in the nineteenth-century, and unlike today, Judges wore 'a larger full-bottomed style of wig' where attorneys and lawyers wore 'bobwigs' and 'pigtails' respectively); and the sleeve looks very like the sleeve of a judicial gown. The question is whether Tenniel had any larger point, beyond linking Judges with the indolence and orientalism associated with the hookah? He (the caterpillar, I mean) is certainly fairly adversarial in the way he questions Alice; and he instructs her, rather imperiously, to recit Southey’s ‘You Are Old Father William’ (the actual title of Southey’s poem is 'The Old Man’s Comforts, And How He Gained Them’)—a text about deeds and consequences of the sort that might be thought to appeal to a legal mind.

Then I found myself thinking about the way pre-chrysalis and post-pupaic insects figure in Victorian literature. Think of the dragonfly in Tennyson’s ‘Two Voices’, or the even more magnificent (because so much larger relative to its human observer) beast Tom encounters in The Water Babies. They are types of transformation, of spiritual metamorphosis and deployed as such. But Carroll’s caterpillar is a topsy-turvey version of this, a kind of trope of anti-metamorphosis. We might expect a caterpillar to look forward to metamorphosis, to be anticipating a dazzling, yet-to-come maturity. But this caterpillar seems already old—a High Court Judge sitting on his sofa, smoking, grumpily quizzing and snapping at the impertinent youngling who’s come disturbing his rest. We don’t, I think, imagine this caterpillar ever changing into any kind of butterfly. Like the law (like the law, say, in Dickens’s 1852-3 Bleak House, a novel Carroll admired) he represents deep-rooted inertia. There’s a particular sort of genius in embodying the principle of stasis in a caterpillar, of all animals.

Which leads me on to say something about animals in Carroll’s book. It would do a kind of violence to the Carroll’s nonsensorium to want to construct a bestiary or rigid taxonomy of Carrollian animals, of course. Part of the way the animals function here is by unexpectedness, by twitting our expectations and as a means of adding vitality and variety to Alice’s progression. So, in place of a taxonomy, a list, with chapter references in square-brackets: in Wonderland Alice meets a rabbit [1]; a mouse [2]; ‘a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures’ (including, if we trust Tenniel, an monkey, a crab and a parrot) [3]; the white rabbit again, Bill the Lizard—apparently an obscure dig at Disraeli, though exactly in what way is not clear—and a puppy-dog [4]; a caterpillar [5]; a frog footman, a fish footman and a pig-baby—plus, of course, the Cheshire Cat [6]; March Hare and dormouse [7]; uncooperative flamingos and the Cheshire Cat again [8]; Gryphon, Mock-Turtle and sugar-haired lobster [9]; several animals return for the trial scene at the end [10-12], including a whole jury box full of beasts. Looking-Glass is a little less bestial, although we do have the black kitten [1]; the chesspiece horse on the poker—and the Jabberwock [2], various Looking-Glass insects and the fawn [3]; the walrus and the oysters he eats [4]; the White Queen turning into a sheep [5]; Humpty Dumpty, whom I suppose must be considered an animal of some type or other [6] and the lion and the unicorn [7]. That’s quite a spread.

We could start to talk about this menagerie by observing that there are two kinds of creature Alice encounters. By which I mean—there are many kinds of creature in the book (of course), but two sorts of provenance for animals and people: domestic and display. By this I mean that (a) some of the animals and artefacts Alice meets derive, in magnified and magical forms, from the sorts of pets a middle class girl might have at home (rabbits; cats; dogs; fish) or the sorts of pastimes she would have: playing cards, chess-sets and so on. By the same token (b) some of the animals are the sort of thing a nice middle-class child might encounter at museums, art galleries or zoos. The dodo in Wonderland is like this, the sort of thing you can see in the Natural History Museum, though not of course in real life (they’d been extinct since 1690, although one has been on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History since the late 1850s): the Duchess, in Tenniel’s illustration, is a version of Quentin Massys ‘A Grotesque Old Woman’, hanging in the National Gallery, and so on.

 We can take this a little further: the mundane and the fantastical figure, to use a wearily over-deployed word, dialectically in these novels. In a sense, that’s kind of the point of the Alice books.

Another aspect of the way the book ‘uses’ animals occurs to me. In Wonderland the figures in authority, or as near to authority as the carnivalesque logic of the imagined world permit, are human: Alice herself; the Duchess; the King and Queen of Hearts (in a lesser sense this is true of the Mad Hatter too, who lords it over his hare and dormouse friends in his insane little way). Figures lower down the social order tend to be animals: either actual servants—the frog footman—or else characters like the white rabbit, fearfully subordinate to the queen, or the parrot-form court officials in the frontispiece to Wonderland. This iterates a clear enough logic: that humans are ‘superior’ to animals. Except it also put particular symbolic emphasis on those animals that resist this great chain of being—the slippery Cheshire Cat, say; the Dodo who takes charge during the Caucus Race; the bossy caterpillar.

The case is a little more complicated in Looking-Glass. The animals in chapter 3, from the deer to the punning insect-minibeasts, exist in a special zone where names do not apply. Otherwise animals are either fabulous monsters, such as jabberwocks and unicorns, or rare. The final transformation from queen to kitten retroactively informs the semiology of the looking-glass animals, which either specifically represent the transformation from human to beast (as the white queen turns into a sheep) or exist, like the Lion, somewhere halfway between an actual lion and a caricature William Gladstone. See also: half-man, half-egg, Humpty Dumpty. Goo goo g’joob.

But stop a bit (the Roberts said) before we have our chat: can we be a little more fundamental? Why animals? OK, it’s a pertinent question for Children’s Literature, because animals are such a massively ubiquitous feature of childhood. We swamp our kids with cuddly animal toys, and tell thm thousands of stories about friendly talking animals (and the occasional wolfish or black-maned-lion unfriendly ones). Why? Once upon a time, when kids grew up in the countryside, on farms or hunting tribes and in close proximity to beasts, this might have made more sense: which is to say, might have spoken more directly to their childish being-in-the-world. But the more we have removed our kids from Nature, the greater role teddy bears and Disneyfied ducks and very hungry caterpillars play in their upbringing. My kids live in a suburban house without pets, never visit a farm and see most of their ‘real’ animals via the magic glowing box we call television. Yet they could not be more fascinated by the question What Does The Fox Say?, by the activities of the intelligent superspy Perry the Platypus on Phineas and Ferb or the antics of Sendak’s Wild Things who live Where. Why?

It’s worth asking ‘why’, because Carroll comes in the middle of a tradition (from oral culture and Grimm through to Watership Down, War Horse and the talking slugs of Turbo). And the answer isn’t going to be simple. Part of it has to do with what Mary Midgley (in Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature, 1978; rev; ed., Routledge 2002) critiques, the tendency of humans to transfer human qualities onto animals, tagging foxes as wily, snakes as devious, lions as courageous and so on. Midgley points out that actual animals are none of these things, they are only themselves. ‘Beasts,’ she says, ‘are neither incarnations of wickedness nor sets of basic needs, nor crude mechanical toys, nor idiot children. They are beasts, each with its own very complex nature. Most of them fail in most respects to conform to their mythical stereotype.’ She adds ‘if then there is no lawless beast outside man, it seems very strange to conclude that there is one inside him. It would be more natural to say that the beast within us gives us partial order; the task of conceptual thought will only be to complete it. [Midgley, 38-39]

Actually, Midgley’s is a very obvious point. Nobody who actually works day-to-day with actual animals would ever mistake them for people in fancy dress. Nonetheless, animal fables are a very ancient mode of human art. ‘Clay tables from ancient Mesopotamia have revealed the existence of collections of proverbs and fables featuring animals as actors some 4,000 years ago, and it is assumed that these tablets are based on even older material’ [D. L. Ashliman, Aesop’s Fables (Barnes and Noble, 2003) p.xxi) But their very antiquity has created a state of affairs in which the personification of beasts has become almost second nature.

The deep affinity in our culture between children and animals—some children, at least, and some animals—is attested not only by a profusion of pets and teddy bears but also by the perennial popularity of stories, films and comic strips about more or less humanoid animals. … Many of these beasts, to be sure, whether of household, barnyard or forest, may have served, from the time of father Aesop to that of Peter Rabbit, as little more than allegorical stand-ins to point a moral concerning another species: our own. … Even so it tells us a great deal if children learn lessons and form relationships most easily by identifying with animals they often know, outside these fictions, only in zoos, dreams or the untamed forests of the imagination. For what is really at issue is relationships, not primarily of animal to animal but—even when no humans appear on the scene—of human to animals and ultimately, through the enlargement this primal relation can bring, of every human and animal being to every other in a world of which all are citizens alike. [Robert M Torrence, Encompassing Nature: a Sourcebook (Counterpoint Press 2002), 2]

‘Yet it is often children in these stories—and often children slighted by the adult world—who are most in touch … with animals and other natural beings.’ Is Alice ‘slighted’? Middle-class, clever, grounded Alice? Surely not! Yet the implication of Torrence’s argument here is that all children feel marginalised, by virtue of the fact that they are children. Though he doesn’t put it in exactly these terms, Torrence does argue that ‘such stories give voice to a tenacious myth of lost innocence’ that is:

both Romantic and Platonic: what is lost in growing up is an inborn remembrance of oneness with the surrounding world which we gradually, almost inexorably relinquish—all but the childlike few who are madmen, lovers or poets.’ [3]

We can forgive Torrence his gush, here, because (although he doesn’t think he’s talking about Alice) this is exactly Carroll’s mis-en-scene. The oneness belongs to Alice; and all the ‘adult’ characters amongst whom she moves (the Duchess’s boy—who turns into a pig—is the only other child in the books) are all of them madmen and madwomen, lovers and poets. What are all these animals doing, in these novel? They are enacting, or enabling, a fundamentally totemic vision of God. As Levi Strauss famously put it, in his still resonant study of the totemic aspects of early human culture, animals are a dominant mode of the totemic imagination because ‘the diversity of species furnishes man with the most intuitive picture at his disposal and constitutes the most direct manifestation he can perceive of the ultimate discontinuity of reality. It is the sensible expression of an objective coding.’ [Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966) 137].

The phenomenon of totemism was one of the primary concerns of cultural anthropologists of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. As the anthropologists of that period collected ethnographic data, they noticed that non-literate societies commonly associated their own clans with natural phenomena, such as species of animals or plants, or natural bodies, or even geographical locations. Local inhabitants often explained this by saying a particular clan has “descended ” from the animal, plant, etc., and sometimes the association would involve complex ritual proscriptions, such as a prohibition against eating or killing the beings connected with one’s clan [David Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Bearer of Ashes (Routledge 1983) 173]

There’s another angle, which takes its impulse from psychoanalysis, might see these novels as almost psychopathological act of displacement. Here is Carrie Rohman on the function of ‘the animal’ in Freud:

The displacement of animality onto marginalized others operates as an attempted repression of the animality that stalks Western subjectivity … indeed, the development of Freudian psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century should be recognised as a logical response to the threats of evolutionary theory. The concept of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis operates as a modernist codification of the problems of animality in the human person. Freud himself hazards an explanation of humanity’s rise from its animal heritage and theorizes that our repression of organicism simultaneously deanimalises us and makes us human. Animality is consequently equated with neurosis in psychoanalytic terms, since one must repress it in order to become, and remain, human. … Freud offers a “cure” for animality’s presence in the human psyche. [Carrie Rohman, ‘Facing the Animal’, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia University Press, 2008), 63]

In Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi (2001), the protagonist deplores humanity’s soft-spot for ‘animalus anthropomorphicus’: ‘we’ve all met one, perhaps even owned one. It is an animal that is “cute”, “friendly”, “loving”, “devoted”, “merry”, “understanding”. These animals lie in ambush in every toy store and children’s zoo … They are the pendants of those “vicious”, “bloodthirsty”, “depraved” animals that inflame the ire of the maniacs I have just mentioned who vent their ire on them with walking sticks and umbrellas. In both cases we look at animals and see a mirror. The obsession with putting ourselves in the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologians’ [Life of Pi, 31]. Pi, or Martel, is here channelling Mary Midgley. Carroll anticipates this, but not by representing it as a mode of Existential Tragedy, but as joyous Nonsense. For Kingsley, the pupae is a symbol of human spiritual rebirth. For Carroll, the caterpillar is its own, cranky, idiosyncratic self. Kids, I think, connect instinctively with that. Animals don’t adhere to any (human) law; they are each of them iterations of the fundamental idiosyncrasy of experience, which is every child’s heady, disorienting experience. It is instinctive in children to resist the appropriation of the animal world to the narrow human moral imperatives of Aesop. The Alice books subvery all that. They say, in effect: I fought the Law, and the Law Wonderland. What child wouldn’t warm to that?

Alice 2: Up With The Smoke, And How Alice Flew

If the rule of three should obtain anywhere, it ought to apply to the fairy tale logicworld of the Alice books. Nor am I the first person to think so. I remember buying Gilbert Adair’s sequel to Wonderland and Looking-Glass when it came out in 1984: Alice Through the Needle's Eye: A Third Adventure for Lewis Carroll's Alice. And it’s not bad, considering; though it reads as dilute compared to the incomparable originals. Alice trying and failing to thread a needle finds the eye growing bigger, falls through and into haystack, which turns out to be a stack of the letter ‘A’. The narrative then strings a series of pun-based animal encounters along an alphabetical conceit (she meets a spelling bee, then two cats joined at the tail who recite the poem ‘The Sands of Dee’; then she meets an elephant and—you get the idea). Needle-land literalises metaphor, so that when it rains cats and dogs actual cats and dogs fall from the sky. Yet somehow, and despite Adair’s fertile imagination the worldbuilding never quite reaches the sprightly solidity of Carroll’s. Of course, that’s a high bar to set for any writer.

Now: I’ve been thinking how might I do the same thing. It’s an idle rumination, since no publisher is looking for a new third Alice book right now. On the up-side, I happen to know the only contemporary illustrator who can hold a candle to Tenniel; and I’d be prepared if necessary to give him the third degree and compel his collaboration by Main Force. Auspiciously I am, like Carroll, also called Charles—my middle name, a family heirloom passed from grandfather to father to son and onto my own boy; though by the same token ‘Robert Carroll’ would be a pseudonym too vainglorious and overreaching to countenance. But since I’m engaged only in thought-experimentation and not actual writing, there’s no reason to hold back.

It seems to me that the problem with Alice Through the Needle's Eye is that Adair gets the balance wrong between rigid logic and surreal fantasy. By ‘wrong’ I mean: he doesn’t weight it the way I’d say Carroll would have done, had Carroll actually written a third volume. A rule of three should progress according to its own logic. So Wonderland is set in the summer, in the countryside, and construes its fantasy via the kind of pastime—card games—a young girl is likely to enjoy in that setting. Looking-Glass is set in the autumn, in a more regimented and neatened version of nature (we might say: the suburban garden) and the story parses a different pastime: chess, more suited for indoors play. The third instalment should, accordingly, be set in the winter (let’s say: Christmas, or New Year), in the city, and be structured according to a third game or pastime—I’m going to suggest: snakes and ladders. Adair, though, reverts to summer countryside, and jettisons the game trope altogether, relying instead (shudder) on chores—needlework! Learning one’s letters! His book also lacks any of the sense we get from Carroll’s two books of childhood slipping away; I mean, the way Looking Glass is more autumnal in tone as well as setting. The third book would surely extrapolate this further. Conceivably, this fact alone explains why Carroll never got around to writing it.

One further consideration: Wonderland traces a downward journey, into the underworld (Alice’s Adventures Underground was Carroll’s original title, of course). Through the Looking-Glass is a horizontal transformation, sideslipping into an alt-England. Through the Needle’s Eye is mere repetition of trajectory. Clearly what we need is a journey upwards.

On the other hand, Adair gets several things right. One is his decision to keep the frame of reference as a kind of generic Victorian: nothing too period specific, but certainly no attempt to shoehorn in contemporary childhood references—how ghastly a sequel would be if it included cellphones and Ben-10 references. Adair pastiches the Carrollian style pretty well, though erring a little on the side of tweeness. Will Brooker, in his excellent study of the reception and interpretations of the Alice books [Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (Continuum 2004)], calls it ‘an intelligent fake’, which is right, I think. But he thinks it lacks structure, or lacks the right kind of Carrollian structure. The alphabetical conceit doesn't have enough narrative or imaginative force, and ‘the characters Alice meets do not seem to follow a clear system, like those in Wonderland and Looking-Glass … Jack and Jill are from a nursery rhyme and the Country Mouse from a fable; the Grampus and the Hairdresser have the same rhythm to their names as the Walrus and the Carpenter … but the main theme throughout is simply encounters with talking animals, some of whom take their names and characteristics from a play on words.’ [Brooker, 168]

So, in my thought-game, the third book should be Up. Alice playing snakes-and-ladders with her two sisters before a roaring fire, on New Year’s Eve. She ponders what magic it is in the fireplace that is able to transform so heavy a thing as a massy log into airy smoke and bright upward-snaking flames; and (of course, falling asleep) she swooshes up the chimney. Inside a sooty chimney is a nicely Victorian location, and Alice might encounter a whole society of sweeps. The pillars and banners of smoke can be as serpentine, or as elevating, as the game-conceit needs. However long the chimney flue becomes, lit by the sparkles of fire and containing any number of crisped, sooty or urban characters, Alice would surely eventually emerge into the night sky above. An aerial Alice could move continually upwards, through citied clouds and hairy comets, to an Orlando-Furioso moon, upon which the little dog is still laughing to see such fun. 21st-century readers have enough of a solid sense of Victorian city life to enable a wide range of reference and playful iteration of 19th-century tropes. What title to choose is a poser, mind. Alice Up The Chimney is a touch too double-entendre for our purposes, I think; and Alice Goes Up In Smoke rather suggests that she explodes. After consideration I think I’d go with Up With The Smoke, And How Alice Flew. Flue, see. Flew.

Maybe not.

But there’s one serious, or semi-serious, point in all this fanciful speculation. It relies on the sense, which I argued in the previous blogpost, that Carroll’s playful levity, his lightness of comic touch, is not incompatible with seriousness. On the contrary, comedy (especially English surreality) is a surer ground of seriousness than po-faced gurning. And what this third Alice book would pinpoint is the buried Dantean structure in Carroll’s narrative. In the first part, Alice goes into the underworld, meets creatures transformed into various monstrous shapes by their rigid natures—except that where Dante is all moral and finger-wagging and doleful-countenanced by what he sees, Carroll plays the resulting peoplescape for laughs—not only more enjoyable, but more ethically and aesthetically eloquent. In part two Alice moves horizontally into a more structured environment. Where Dante figures a mountain with seven terraces (one for each deadly sin) followed by a summit that leads the traveller to heaven, Carroll imagines a chessboard where Alice moves through seven squares before passing, in the eighth, into her queenly apotheosis. A third Alice book should surely move, like Dante, up into the sky. And there should be a rose at the end of it. One bubble more? Why not?

Alice 1: Through the Looking-Glass and What Apuleius Found There

To start by approaching one author who had a profound shaping effect upon the younger me by means of another author who had a profound shaping effect upon the younger me. Here's Robert Graves’ poem ‘Alice’ (from Welchman’s Hose, 1925):

When that prime heroine of our nation, Alice,
Climbing courageously in through the Palace
Of Looking Glass, found it inhabited
By chessboard personages, white and red,
Involved in never-ending tournament,
She being of a speculative bent
Had long foreshadowed something of the kind,
Asking herself: 'Suppose I stood behind
And viewed the fireplace of Their drawing-room
From hearthrug level, why must I assume
That what I'd see would need to correspond
With what 1 now see? And the rooms beyond?'
Proved right, yet not content with what she had done,
Alice decided to enlarge her fun:
She set herself, with truly British pride
In being a pawn and playing for her side,
And simple faith in simple stratagem,
To learn the rules and moves and perfect them.
So prosperously there she settled down
That six moves only and she'd won her crown—
A triumph surely! But her greater feat
Was rounding these adventures off complete:
Accepting them, when safe returned again,
As queer but true, not only in the main
True, but as true as anything you'd swear to,
The usual three dimensions you are heir to.
For Alice though a child could understand
That neither did this chance-discovered land
Make nohow or contrariwise the clean
Dull round of mid-Victorian routine,
Nor did Victoria's golden rule extend
Beyond the glass: it came to the dead end
Where empty hearses turn about; thereafter
Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,
The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass
Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,
Where young Gargantua made whole holiday . . .
But further from our heroine not to stray,
Let us observe with what uncommon sense—
Though a secure and easy reference
Between Red Queen and Kitten could be found—
She made no false assumption on that ground
(A trap in which the scientist would fall)
That queens and kittens are identical.

This is a specifically postwar poem; Graves, still shellshocked by his experiences, looking back on one of his favourite childhood books and finding everything it had meant to him turned contrariwise by the trauma of conflict. It’s a poem about the way travelling to a land of unreality (a land of death) estranges normalcy; and it’s also about the White Goddess, in nascent form—1925 was before Graves had properly formulated his ideas on this, but it’s interesting to consider the extent to which the sexless inviolability of this ‘prime’ female figure feeds into Her; the way She is not the same thing as her mundane-life, feline analogues. ‘The dead end where empty hearses turn about’ is an especially resonant phrase, I think. Not the mud of the trenches, but the paraphernalia of a High Victorian funeral. It intimates, without being too literal-minded about it (and the whole point of this poem, as of Graves’ whole poetic output, is also what he finds as the ground of the appeal of the Alice books: namely not taking the world too literally or scientifically)—this poem intimates that the world behind the mirror is a kind of afterlife. Which of course it is. To fall from a great height is to die; to crash through glass is to die; to eat strange foods and mushrooms is to risk of being poisoned; to approach wild animals is to risk fatal mauling; to plunge unprepared into the salt sea is to risk drowning. All these things happen to Alice, and yet she does not die.

That Alice’s adventures have, in some sense, to do with death has been argued before. Back in the 1950s Peter Coveney insisted that there was something fundamentally unhealthy in Carroll (and J M Barrie’s) preference for children over adults. And we can hardly deny that there was something a bit oddball about Carroll the man: the stammering, shy-mannered, purple-handed fellow—he stained his hands purple-blue working with the chemicals necessary for his photographic pursuit, and always wore white kit gloves as a result—expending all his emotional energies on pre-pubescent girls. Nowadays we’re most likely to frame our sense of disquiet about this in terms of paedophilia, the great moral panic of our generation. Coveney sees in it broader but rather more morbid terms:

The justification of secular art is the responsibility it bears for the enrichment of human awareness. The cult of the child in certain authors at the end of the nineteenth century is a denial of this responsibility. Their awareness of childhood is no longer an interest in growth and integration, such as we found in The Prelude, but a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world. One feels their morbid withdrawal towards psychic death. The misery on the face of Carroll and Barrie was there because their response towards life had been subtly but irrevocably negated. Their photographs seem to look out at us from the nostalgic prisons they had created for themselves in the cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan. [Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: the Individual and Society: a Study of the Theme in English Literature (1957; 2nd ed 1967), 241]

I don’t think this is right, but it’s worth dwelling on why. Coveney goes on:

The innocence of Alice casts its incisive but delicately subtle intelligence upon Victorian society and upon life. But it is not simply that. It is not simply anything. Even in this first and greatest work, there is a content not far removed from nightmare. Alice in Wonderland has the claustrophobic atmosphere of a children’s Kafka. It is the frustrated ‘quest’ for the ‘Garden’ which in the event is peopled with such unpleasant creatures.

It’s not that this is wrong per se, I think; it’s only that it misses the quality of joy in the Kafka. I’m tempted to say that Carroll brings out the fun in Kafka better than Kafka does himself (Deleuze, in his Coldness and Cruelty book, says that when Kafka first read his stories out to people in Vienna, the audience fell about laughing. Which is very possible).

But, look-see: the elephant had padded into the room. There are several ways of addressing the ‘paedophilia’ angle as far as Carroll was concerned. One way, of course, would be simply to sweep him into the box marked Monster and refuse to engage with his tainted art. I think that would be a pity, not because I’m certain that his heart was perfectly pure when he took his photographs of naked nine-year-old girls, but because the art itself doesn’t seem to me tainted. The paedophile’s fantasy (I assume) is that of the sexually available child; but the striking thing about Alice is how unavailable she is, how far she resists attempts to assimilate her to our agendas. That she is her own person is the ground of her splendour. Her curious inviolability is integral to the way she works in these stories. I also tend to think that the best reading of the ‘Freudian’ symbolism of the books—all those vaginal doors, tight entrances, all those phallic swellings and shrinkings, swimming through seas of bodily fluids, the oedipal anxieties of the Queen of Heart’s pseudo-castrating cry of ‘Off with his head!’—that the best reading of all that stuff is William Empson’s ‘The Child as Swain’ chapter in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson engages enthusiastically with all the ‘Freudian’ symbolism in the books, but does so within the conceptual framework of Some Version’s larger agenda: putting the complex into the simple; the ironies of class; the relationship between heroic and pastoral modes. In fact, recently re-reading 'The Child as Swain' was a revelation to me. It brought home to me how far the account is from being a straightforward Freudian decoding of Carroll's books, despite the fact that Empson, tricksily, insists that it is ('the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms', 253). In fact Empson’s stress is on the way the (sexual) world of adulthood becomes nonsensical when it is, in E.'s rather brilliant phrase, 'seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness.' That’s right, I think.

Instead of this, I think, we can read Wonderland and Looking-glass-world, Graves-ishly, as that place where:

Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,
The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass
Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,
Where young Gargantua made whole holiday . . .

Apuleius and Rabelais could also be construed as Kafkaeque nightmares if they weren’t so joyful. And I’d say that Apuleius is closer in tone to Carroll’s, because both Asinus aureus and Alicia aurea understand the extent to which desire is construed by frustration. Gargantua is a creature of giant appetites which he indulges on a giant scale. Apuleius’s ass is a man reduced to mule-ishness, repeatedly baulked of his yearnings as he travels through a land of fantastical adventures. And this latter is the logic of the Alice books. After arriving in Wonderland Alice peers through the door to ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’ (‘How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and cool fountains!). But she cannot get to it. She is much too big to fit through the door. Then she finds a way of magically shrinking herself, only to realise that she has left the key to the door on the table and out of reach. She grows too tall again, and then shrinks down. She has the ability to alter her body, to enlarge it, to shrink it, and yet always seems to find that whatever size she thinks she wants is the wrong one. When she meets a group of animals she scares them away by talking about how her pet cat likes to eat such beings (‘I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!’ she says at the end of chapter 3, as if it wasn’t something under her control!) She approaches a table with many empty seats and places laid for tea and tasty food, but the Hatter, hare and dormouse sing out ‘no room! No room!’ Upon finally arriving at the beautiful garden she discovers it in the possession of a homicidal monarch (‘Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any time’). When she tries to play croquet, the mallets—being flamingos—keep twisting away from the shots she wants to play. In Looking Glass frustration becomes, as it were, a formal principle of the story-world: one must go backwards to go forwards, must run as fast as possible to stay in the same place, and vice versa.

The reason the books themselves don’t feel frustrating to read, despite being stitched together out of frustrations, is that Carroll understands how far our desires are structured by what thwarts them. Alice encounters a delightfully varied, diverting, idiosyncratic and funny succession of individuals, but at a deeper level her story is a general story. To quote Adam Phillips:

All our stories are about what happens to our wishes. About the world as we would like it to be, and the world as it happens to be, irrespective of our wishes and despite our hopes. Our needs thwarted by the needs of others; our romances always threatened by tragedy; our jokes ruined by the people who don’t get them. The usual antagonism of day-dream and reality. [Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (Faber 1998), 1]

Phillips’ argument in this book is about growing up, about how we accept disillusionment as the price of adulthood, how we shed childhood’s vitality—or indeed whether we do these things. His point is more than than ‘desire without something that resists it is insufficient, wishy-washy, literally immaterial’ [4], although that’s obviously part of it (Phillips adds the concomitant: 'a world that too much resists my desire is uninhabitable, unliveable in’). Of course it is only my hunger than can transform food into a satisfying meal. But it’s more than that. It is that children understand desire in a more forceful way than adults ever can.

Children are fervent in their looking-forward to things; whereas adults can lose a sense of what is there for the taking. The child, it seemed to Freud, was the virtuoso of desire. [6]

That’s true in a general sense, I think, but particularly true of the Alice books.

What do we find, through the Looking-Glass? We find what Apuleius found: a queen. I first read the Golden Ass in Robert Graves' splendidly counter-intuitive, yet (I still think) effective 1951 Penguin Classics version; counter-intuitive because he deliberately renders Apuleius's ornate, game-playing, fancy Latin in plain, expressive English. It shouldn't work, yet somehow it does. And by the time he came to translate that book Graves had reached his crucial, intensely personal conclusions concerning the White Goddess. Apuleius' Lucius ends his asinine peregrinations by receiving a vision from The Queen of Heaven: he can be returned to human shape by eating the crown of roses being carries by the priests of Isis in procession. He does so, and afterwards becomes an acolyte of the goddess, worshipping her in Rome as Campensis. Why does she have three names (Regina Coeli/Isis/Campensis), I hear you ask? That's because she's actually the triple goddess. All this had personal resonance for Graves: his own bestial manliness, his bashed-about youth, his eventual female-determined sanctuary, all of which undeniably informs his translation. But it has resonance for Carroll's text, too, which retells this fantasy narrative from, as it were, the other side. The human-beast mutations happen to other people, not Alice. What happens to Alice is that she reveals her true nature. She is Al-Isis; she is the new White Queen. She is the White Goddess. That's why this blogpost starts with that splendid Tenniel illustration of the three queens, the three goddesses, all one as maiden, mother and crone.