Go Ask Alice

June 8&15, 2015

It was extremely difficult to follow literature/novels reviews, not to mention the literature it is about named "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

I've read Alice in wonderland twice - once in Chinese and the other in English. Although I had known that it was more than a children book and been well prepared, I could not notice, to say nothing of  deciphering, mocks, metaphors, philosophical quests and etc. which were supposedly imbued throughout the book.

Part of myself knew what was going wrong: I am simply not English-sophisticated enough. Or using metaphor of the review, I have not made my way through the membrane into the language cell and the broader social discourse.

This is more than clear when I came across this part of the review: "As for the anapest, the waltzing metre in which Carroll delighted ("I engage with the Snark--every night after dark--/In a dreamy delirious fight"), it lay dormant for decades, and then burst out in the keen exclamations of Dr. Seuss: "You have brains in your head./You have feet in your shoes."

I have absolutely no idea about whatsoever this paragraph means. Even with the help of a dictionary/wiki, I cannot understand how the metre in the former revives in later. Besides, I did not know what an anapest was and what a metre was before today.

This review, however, provides a couple of interesting anecdotes, as well as some common facts which I did not know either (for example, Carroll Lewis is the pen name, and author's real life name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).

The anecdotes (or history) include that he was supposed to become priest because of a fellowship's conditions. (Wiki told me that Dean Liddell, whose second daughter Alice Liddell was the girl for whom this famous book was written one year later, permitted Dodgson's stay at the college in defiance the rules.)

That he was a photographer, obsessed with taking photos of little children, preferably naked. Not only did he seem to be very comfortable requesting such a permission from children's parents, but also children's partents did not seem startled by his request at all. The review's author offered one explanation (which in turn is from a review book this review I guess is actually for, or promoting): In his day, the trend regards childhood as a separate realm. "If it was inconceivable, in genteel circles, that Carroll could present a carnal threat, that was not because he was a clergyman, or the writer of cherished books, but because children could never be objects of desire. Far from being adults in bud, they were fenced off, in a garden of unknowing, an d that is why parents were content to let Carroll, himself an innocent, wander in and browse. Freud's 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' including one one 'Infantile Sexuality,' were published in 1905. Carroll, mercifully, had died seven years earlier."

No matter the explanation is true or not, it is still interesting. It also seemed that the moral etiquette forbid underhanded courtship of a chaperone, which was more puzzling through the looking-glass of time. After all, a middle-aged man could take a picture of three little sisters and give it the title "Open Your Mouth and Shut Your Eyes".

But again who knows? The life fades away, slowly and slowly almost as the cat on the branch, but the cat left smile whereas life doesn't.