Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I remember reading and loving this book as a child. I identified with Alice’s point of view, lost in a world both strange and familiar. All the characters she encountered were mad and funny. There was a sense of playful and sparkling adventure. I loved the vintage illustrations by John Tenniel. I guess the charming Walt Disney adaptation also influenced my perception of the book.

My impression, as I re-read Lewis Carroll’s novel recently, is entirely different. The atmosphere of childish innocence is still there throughout: Alice sounds like a smart, Victorian, well-mannered young girl. But she keeps growing and shrinking uncontrollably — like a penis. And Wonderland feels like a sort of dystopia, where strange creatures and objects are incapable of making sense. The funny puns and situations are, in fact, not so amusing and appear instead as a way to mangle common sense with wild logic and absurd, albeit rational reasoning. As a result, as the Mock Turtle says, “it sounds uncommon nonsense”.

To me now, Lewis Carroll appears to borrow from the 18th-century satirists, such as Jonathan Swift or Voltaire, and to pave the way for 20th-century surrealism and the black, absurdist comedies of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Tom Stoppard or even Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut. In the end, as I re-read this book, it is getting “curiouser and curiouser”.

The edition I am holding (published in the US in 1975) includes meticulous illustrations by Arthur Rackham, best known for his work on fairy tales.