FROM TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Lewis Carroll, overdrawn again
The French connection to the Alice books, and the difficulties of trying to write about their authorDaniel Karlin Recommend?
The application of common sense to the life and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is an odd business. Jenny Woolf’s premiss is that Lewis Carroll (she refers to him as “Carroll” throughout) is an explainable figure: eccentric, certainly, but not perversely so; a man whose family history and social class account for many of his life choices, which were in themselves normal and defensible. She engages in cautious speculation about Carroll’s relationship with his parents, noting (for example) the lack of sympathetic maternal figures in his work, but refrains from rushing in where psychoanalysis has not feared to tread. She emphasizes the significance of the large Victorian family, not only in Carroll’s childhood but in his maturity when, as the oldest son, he took on responsibility for his siblings’ welfare after his father’s death. On the chart of intellectual and emotional development open to a clerical gentleman of moderate means, Carroll registers as average. She thinks it possible that he had an unhappy experience of illicit sexual passion in the period leading up to the composition of the Alice books, but is scrupulous about drawing attention to gaps in the record, and in any case does not make grand claims for her theory. The only area in which she allows herself the luxury of overstatement concerns the importance of Carroll’s Oxford bank account records, which she has unearthed, and of which she is forgivably proud. It is amusing to discover that Carroll was often overdrawn, and adds zest to the Duchess’s parody of the proverbial motto (“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves”), but he was never seriously in debt and his attitude to money was far less anxious than that of, say, Robert Browning or Thomas Hardy. The “narrative” Woolf reconstructs from Carroll’s financial transactions is determinedly unsensational: a large payment to someone called “Forster” in November 1861 may or may not be linked to the putative unhappy love affair, but the fact is we don’t know: “the Forster payment stands as a reminder that Carroll did have a private life, however inaccessible it may be to us today”.
The most contentious aspect of this private life concerns the accusation of paedophilia; here Woolf is bound to express a view, and cannot simply agree with Elizabeth Sewell’s pitying indifference to anglophone critics’ “insistent dwelling on Carroll’s relations with little girls: the nude photographs, the Alice Liddell episode, the lost volumes and excised pages of his diary, and so on. Could we now give this a rest, I wonder?”. No, we can’t; we’re made to tread the weary round again, with Woolf as our commonsensical guide, pointing out how family reticence, mistaken inference, and overheated psychoanalytic speculation have combined, in a malign version of the letter-substitution game Carroll was so fond of, to change bachelor into predator. Carroll’s fixation on sexless purity, Woolf argues, and his location of the ideal form of that purity in young girls, were neither unusual for his time, nor discreditable; they may have masked all kinds of dark desires, of which the essential thing to say is that we know nothing. The evidence suggests that his friendships with children were, in the main, happy and consoling; the missing documents are unlikely to contain anything sinister.
Woolf’s attempt to demystify and detoxify Carroll’s life and mentality is largely uncontentious (it is not as original as she would like us to think: the normative defence of Carroll’s sexual nature is anticipated, for example, in Martin Gardner’s introduction to The Annotated Alice), but it leaves behind a bland, tasteless residue. It is no good exorcizing the demon of paedophilia if the daemon of nonsense remains invisible to the mind’s eye. Although this daemon entered into service with Carroll as an entertainer of children, it was not born into that service, or subjugated by its fate. Carroll’s talent for friendship with children had in any case no need of “genius”. It consisted in the apparently simple art of giving them his full attention – an art most adults, whether parents or not, can’t manage. But the Alice books (let alone “The Hunting of the Snark”) don’t offer children this kind of undivided reciprocal play. They reserve their deepest pleasures for adults, and child readers, I think, sense that this is so, and in turn withhold their full engagement, or what Carroll would have called their love.
Carroll’s genius must be sought in literature, and as with Coleridge it is not just a question of allusion, but of imaginative combination. He has portmanteau images as well as words: Alice’s descent into the Underworld, her yearning for an inaccessible Paradise, her shape-changing, her encounters with monsters and mad creatures, all represent traditional motifs of epic, or romance, or religious quest, but these motifs are not inert: they have been bathed in, and transfigured by, the minutely depicted details of Alice’s domestic middle-class existence, expressed in convincing processes of thought and turns of phrase. Carroll treats these details as seriously as he does the myths with which they are to be fused: “nonsense” is founded on what Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, calls “the serious imitation of the everyday”. In this sense, Carroll’s style may lead us back to his “self”, may measure his discernment (always, in any artist, an index of passion). But biography is a pig-headed child. When she read the Alice books as a seven-year-old, Woolf tells us, she did not understand them, but wanted to meet the author and was disappointed to discover that he was dead: “I think I have been trying to track him down ever since”. Like Alice herself in the looking-glass world, Woolf walks determinedly towards the object of her desire, only to find herself back where she started. It is not Carroll that is the problem, but the biographical method itself – and, unlike Alice, Woolf does not learn her lesson.
Woolf is no literary critic, and the gulf that separates her from Elizabeth Sewell may be gauged by the only passage in which she trenches on Sewell’s territory. Of the Sylvie and Bruno novels she remarks, with a nervous philistine whinny: “They have been hailed as the first deconstructed novels ever written, and have their fans, notably in France, where their peculiar ideas have been said to provide topics for câfé philosophers”. (“Câfé” is merely a spelling mistake; “have been said to” has the authentic stamp of British ignorance.) These “câfé philosophers”, among them Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, André Breton, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, speak out in Lewis Carroll: Voices from France, which has been edited by Clare Imholtz from the “virtually complete” manuscript left by Sewell at her death in 2001. She was then over ninety years old, and had published her first work on Carroll (and Edward Lear), The Field of Nonsense, in 1952. Although Voices from France has many fine aperçus, as a whole it is discontinuous, repetitious and rambling. It should not be read independently, but as a set of offshoots and digressions from, and occasionally recantations of, the earlier work.
The Field of Nonsense was nothing if not systematic – Sewell’s love of taxonomy rivals Carroll’s own – but it was also both witty and profound in its self-consciousness about system. Most of the book was devoted to a reading of “nonsense” as a game, played according to strict rules of displacement (affinity by incongruity, depth by surface, meaning by symbol) and dedicated to the paradoxical task of keeping disorder and irrationality at bay. But in a superb final chapter, “Will You, Won’t You?”, Sewell turned the whole book on its head, and allowed a radical mysticism to break the circle of her argument. In this reading of “nonsense”, “all the safety of the game has disappeared and we are in the world of religion, magic, alchemy, astrology, poetry and those strange riddles, oracular or monstrous, proposed to human beings as a matter of life and death”.
Voices from France picks up this alternative mode of “reading” nonsense, and explores it from the standpoint of French responses to Carroll, centring on Mallarmé, on the Surrealists, and on Deconstruction. The connection between Carroll and Mallarmé, which Sewell had briefly posited in The Field of Nonsense, is richly suggestive, and is brilliantly introduced by a double anecdote linking the genesis of Mallarmé’s prose poem “Le Démon de l’analogie” to that of Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark”. The two writers meet on the edge of an abyss, signposted by Mallarmé’s key term “le néant”, and by the “perfect and absolute blank” of the Bellman’s map. Although Sewell is wrong to suggest that English lacks a literary tradition of “nothingness” – she ignores Donne, Rochester, Edward FitzGerald, Wallace Stevens, among others – she is compelling on the gravitational force exerted by “nothing” on the worlds created by Carroll, and on the ways in which that force has been registered by French writers and critics. The attraction of Carroll to the Surrealists is more obvious and more familiar, but Sewell reminds us that it went beyond thematic or formal elements (representations of the unconscious, the “logic” of dreams): André Breton grasped the significance of nonsense as a protest, a rebellion against “the depreciation of language” and therefore a political act.
The darkness in Carroll, his melancholy (think of the tears shed in the Alice books, by Alice herself and by the creatures she encounters), his figurings of violence and terror, all this has long been recognized, but has mainly been treated thematically; the French connection, Sewell argues, helps us to see Carroll’s formal and verbal preoccupation with nonsense as a reflexive art. This is a case worth making; unfortunately, Sewell presents it in bits and pieces. Ideas are left trailing, close readings alternate with personal asides and speculative flights, argument shades into chat. At times her method amounts to no more than vague gesticulation, towards a region others will have to explore with less insouciance.
Jenny Woolf
THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL
Understanding the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
326pp. Haus. £18.99.
978 1 906598 68 6
Elizabeth Sewell
LEWIS CARROLL
Voices from France
212pp. Lewis Carroll Society of North America. $35.
978 0 930326 16 4
Daniel Karlin is Professor of English at the University of Sheffield. His book Proust’s English was published in 2005 and the third volume of the Poems of Browning, of which he is co-editor, appeared in paperback earlier this year.
Lewis Carroll, overdrawn again
The French connection to the Alice books, and the difficulties of trying to write about their authorDaniel Karlin Recommend?
The application of common sense to the life and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is an odd business. Jenny Woolf’s premiss is that Lewis Carroll (she refers to him as “Carroll” throughout) is an explainable figure: eccentric, certainly, but not perversely so; a man whose family history and social class account for many of his life choices, which were in themselves normal and defensible. She engages in cautious speculation about Carroll’s relationship with his parents, noting (for example) the lack of sympathetic maternal figures in his work, but refrains from rushing in where psychoanalysis has not feared to tread. She emphasizes the significance of the large Victorian family, not only in Carroll’s childhood but in his maturity when, as the oldest son, he took on responsibility for his siblings’ welfare after his father’s death. On the chart of intellectual and emotional development open to a clerical gentleman of moderate means, Carroll registers as average. She thinks it possible that he had an unhappy experience of illicit sexual passion in the period leading up to the composition of the Alice books, but is scrupulous about drawing attention to gaps in the record, and in any case does not make grand claims for her theory. The only area in which she allows herself the luxury of overstatement concerns the importance of Carroll’s Oxford bank account records, which she has unearthed, and of which she is forgivably proud. It is amusing to discover that Carroll was often overdrawn, and adds zest to the Duchess’s parody of the proverbial motto (“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves”), but he was never seriously in debt and his attitude to money was far less anxious than that of, say, Robert Browning or Thomas Hardy. The “narrative” Woolf reconstructs from Carroll’s financial transactions is determinedly unsensational: a large payment to someone called “Forster” in November 1861 may or may not be linked to the putative unhappy love affair, but the fact is we don’t know: “the Forster payment stands as a reminder that Carroll did have a private life, however inaccessible it may be to us today”.
The most contentious aspect of this private life concerns the accusation of paedophilia; here Woolf is bound to express a view, and cannot simply agree with Elizabeth Sewell’s pitying indifference to anglophone critics’ “insistent dwelling on Carroll’s relations with little girls: the nude photographs, the Alice Liddell episode, the lost volumes and excised pages of his diary, and so on. Could we now give this a rest, I wonder?”. No, we can’t; we’re made to tread the weary round again, with Woolf as our commonsensical guide, pointing out how family reticence, mistaken inference, and overheated psychoanalytic speculation have combined, in a malign version of the letter-substitution game Carroll was so fond of, to change bachelor into predator. Carroll’s fixation on sexless purity, Woolf argues, and his location of the ideal form of that purity in young girls, were neither unusual for his time, nor discreditable; they may have masked all kinds of dark desires, of which the essential thing to say is that we know nothing. The evidence suggests that his friendships with children were, in the main, happy and consoling; the missing documents are unlikely to contain anything sinister.
Woolf’s attempt to demystify and detoxify Carroll’s life and mentality is largely uncontentious (it is not as original as she would like us to think: the normative defence of Carroll’s sexual nature is anticipated, for example, in Martin Gardner’s introduction to The Annotated Alice), but it leaves behind a bland, tasteless residue. It is no good exorcizing the demon of paedophilia if the daemon of nonsense remains invisible to the mind’s eye. Although this daemon entered into service with Carroll as an entertainer of children, it was not born into that service, or subjugated by its fate. Carroll’s talent for friendship with children had in any case no need of “genius”. It consisted in the apparently simple art of giving them his full attention – an art most adults, whether parents or not, can’t manage. But the Alice books (let alone “The Hunting of the Snark”) don’t offer children this kind of undivided reciprocal play. They reserve their deepest pleasures for adults, and child readers, I think, sense that this is so, and in turn withhold their full engagement, or what Carroll would have called their love.
Carroll’s genius must be sought in literature, and as with Coleridge it is not just a question of allusion, but of imaginative combination. He has portmanteau images as well as words: Alice’s descent into the Underworld, her yearning for an inaccessible Paradise, her shape-changing, her encounters with monsters and mad creatures, all represent traditional motifs of epic, or romance, or religious quest, but these motifs are not inert: they have been bathed in, and transfigured by, the minutely depicted details of Alice’s domestic middle-class existence, expressed in convincing processes of thought and turns of phrase. Carroll treats these details as seriously as he does the myths with which they are to be fused: “nonsense” is founded on what Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, calls “the serious imitation of the everyday”. In this sense, Carroll’s style may lead us back to his “self”, may measure his discernment (always, in any artist, an index of passion). But biography is a pig-headed child. When she read the Alice books as a seven-year-old, Woolf tells us, she did not understand them, but wanted to meet the author and was disappointed to discover that he was dead: “I think I have been trying to track him down ever since”. Like Alice herself in the looking-glass world, Woolf walks determinedly towards the object of her desire, only to find herself back where she started. It is not Carroll that is the problem, but the biographical method itself – and, unlike Alice, Woolf does not learn her lesson.
Woolf is no literary critic, and the gulf that separates her from Elizabeth Sewell may be gauged by the only passage in which she trenches on Sewell’s territory. Of the Sylvie and Bruno novels she remarks, with a nervous philistine whinny: “They have been hailed as the first deconstructed novels ever written, and have their fans, notably in France, where their peculiar ideas have been said to provide topics for câfé philosophers”. (“Câfé” is merely a spelling mistake; “have been said to” has the authentic stamp of British ignorance.) These “câfé philosophers”, among them Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, André Breton, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, speak out in Lewis Carroll: Voices from France, which has been edited by Clare Imholtz from the “virtually complete” manuscript left by Sewell at her death in 2001. She was then over ninety years old, and had published her first work on Carroll (and Edward Lear), The Field of Nonsense, in 1952. Although Voices from France has many fine aperçus, as a whole it is discontinuous, repetitious and rambling. It should not be read independently, but as a set of offshoots and digressions from, and occasionally recantations of, the earlier work.
The Field of Nonsense was nothing if not systematic – Sewell’s love of taxonomy rivals Carroll’s own – but it was also both witty and profound in its self-consciousness about system. Most of the book was devoted to a reading of “nonsense” as a game, played according to strict rules of displacement (affinity by incongruity, depth by surface, meaning by symbol) and dedicated to the paradoxical task of keeping disorder and irrationality at bay. But in a superb final chapter, “Will You, Won’t You?”, Sewell turned the whole book on its head, and allowed a radical mysticism to break the circle of her argument. In this reading of “nonsense”, “all the safety of the game has disappeared and we are in the world of religion, magic, alchemy, astrology, poetry and those strange riddles, oracular or monstrous, proposed to human beings as a matter of life and death”.
Voices from France picks up this alternative mode of “reading” nonsense, and explores it from the standpoint of French responses to Carroll, centring on Mallarmé, on the Surrealists, and on Deconstruction. The connection between Carroll and Mallarmé, which Sewell had briefly posited in The Field of Nonsense, is richly suggestive, and is brilliantly introduced by a double anecdote linking the genesis of Mallarmé’s prose poem “Le Démon de l’analogie” to that of Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark”. The two writers meet on the edge of an abyss, signposted by Mallarmé’s key term “le néant”, and by the “perfect and absolute blank” of the Bellman’s map. Although Sewell is wrong to suggest that English lacks a literary tradition of “nothingness” – she ignores Donne, Rochester, Edward FitzGerald, Wallace Stevens, among others – she is compelling on the gravitational force exerted by “nothing” on the worlds created by Carroll, and on the ways in which that force has been registered by French writers and critics. The attraction of Carroll to the Surrealists is more obvious and more familiar, but Sewell reminds us that it went beyond thematic or formal elements (representations of the unconscious, the “logic” of dreams): André Breton grasped the significance of nonsense as a protest, a rebellion against “the depreciation of language” and therefore a political act.
The darkness in Carroll, his melancholy (think of the tears shed in the Alice books, by Alice herself and by the creatures she encounters), his figurings of violence and terror, all this has long been recognized, but has mainly been treated thematically; the French connection, Sewell argues, helps us to see Carroll’s formal and verbal preoccupation with nonsense as a reflexive art. This is a case worth making; unfortunately, Sewell presents it in bits and pieces. Ideas are left trailing, close readings alternate with personal asides and speculative flights, argument shades into chat. At times her method amounts to no more than vague gesticulation, towards a region others will have to explore with less insouciance.
Jenny Woolf
THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL
Understanding the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
326pp. Haus. £18.99.
978 1 906598 68 6
Elizabeth Sewell
LEWIS CARROLL
Voices from France
212pp. Lewis Carroll Society of North America. $35.
978 0 930326 16 4
Daniel Karlin is Professor of English at the University of Sheffield. His book Proust’s English was published in 2005 and the third volume of the Poems of Browning, of which he is co-editor, appeared in paperback earlier this year.
Very different books trying to do different things. I think the professor prefers the more intellectual one! I prefer the biography! It's all a matter of opinion I guess
RispondiElimina