Glenn J. Shea
20 de noviembre de 2014
The definitive annotated edition
Few books of any description are surrounded by the jungle of explication that has grown up around the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. There are several full-length biographies, annotated and critical editions of the stories, selections of Caroll's letters and diaries, tours of Carroll's Oxford, and by now innumerable essays on every conceivable aspect of Carroll (or Charles Dodgson) as don, mathematician, photographer, church deacon, linguist, logician, weirdo and prophet; and of the Alice books as children's lit, dream lit, satire, Victoriana, Zen koan, psychoanalytic palimpsest and nonpareil. And for all of that, some of it very good, some useful, much dull and disappointing, the Alice books--properly, ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE--retain not just their originality, their wit, and their power to amuse and bemuse, but their irreducible strangeness. No degree of familiarity--and over the years I've come to know them almost by heart--ever reduces the genuinely dreamlike comic irrationality; rather it becomes all the more potent and fascinating. In contrast with much twentieth-century Surrealism, with its violence, darkness and tiresome insistence on shocking the bourgeois, Carroll's strangeness was a natural self, released by the circumstance of telling stories to three little girls on a boat trip down the Isis. In the circus-mirror vision of that self, all polite Victorian culture--its Mandarin courtesy, compulsive moralizing, leaden-footed didactic verse, its coffinlike repression--was blown up, distorted and exploded with a combination of mathematical precision and bubble-busting glee. It will never happen--not precisely like this--ever again. No one has ever successfully imitated Carroll, and no one ever will. He happened only once, a kind of happy accident of nature, for which may we ever be thankful.If you want to tackle the now-vast literature of Alice--or just want to be able to catch some of the jokes now obscured by time--the best and obvious starting point is THE ANNOTATED ALICE, by Martin Gardner. The recent definitive edition (Norton, 1999,hardcover) combines the original edition with MORE ANNOTATED ALICE and includes the text of both stories with the suppressed "Wasp in the Wig" chapter, the Tenniel illustrations, and an amusing plethora of notes, and it's a splendid piece of work. Gardner also did an annotated edition of "The Hunting of the Snark," (Penguin, 1974) in which he again proved himself Carroll's perfect and inspired accompanist--as when, with Gardner's assistance, the Billiard-Maker wanders out of the poem and into one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Greek Interpreter"; it's a shame the whole thing isn't included in the ALICE. (If Carroll were French the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade would have him all sewn up in a single volume, including his serious mathematical works, a box of which so disconcerted Victoria when she asked to see "more of the works of Mr. Carroll." It wouldn't be fun, but it would be complete, and it would be annotated to the nines.) Robert Phillips edited a collection of critical essays, ASPECTS OF ALICE (Penguin, 1974), though the fun factor isn't all that high. One might've wished for something along the lines of Frederick Crews's great book THE POOH PERPLEX, in which "several Academicians of varying Critical Persuasions" approach the Bear of Little Brain, with splendid comic results. Morton N. Cohen's LEWIS CARROLL: A Biography (Knopf, 1995) is thorough, intelligent and copiously illustrated; Cohen also edited REFLECTIONS IN A LOOKING GLASS: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer (Aperture, 1998), the best book I've seen on Carroll's photography.Glenn Shea, from Glenn's Book Notes, at www.bookbarnniantic.comVer másVer menos
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