Meraviglie nel Mondo di Alice, tesina

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

A cura di Cosimo Cherveddu

Sommario

• Prefazione, p. 3
• Historical Background and the Author, p. 4
• The Novel, p. 5
• Themes, p. 6
• Language between Sense and Nonsense, p. 7
• Alice nell’Arte: Dalì e il Surrealismo, p. 9
• Alice nella Filosofia: Freud e l’Inconscio, p. 12
• La simmetria e le sue conseguenze, p. 16
• Conclusione, p. 21
• Bibliografia e Sitografia, p. 22

Prefazione

Chi non conosce la storia di Alice e le sue avventure nel Paese delle Meraviglie?

Eppure non è altrettanto noto quanto sia grande il debito nei confronti di Lewis Carroll e dei suoi personaggi. Alice, dalla fantasia del suo autore, è diventata un vero e proprio simbolo, così come il Cappellaio Matto, il Bruco, il Coniglio Bianco, il Gatto del Cheshire o la Regina di Cuori: tutti ormai appartengono all’immaginario collettivo da generazioni.

Non si contano libri, film, musica, opere d’arte, fumetti e videogiochi che provengono dall’opera di Carroll: dalle opere dei Surrealisti alla musica di Chick Corea, dal videogioco di American McGee alle pubblicazioni di noti divulgatori scientifici, da Odifreddi a Gilmore, dalle numerose trasposizioni cinematografiche alla mostra dedicata all’Alice nell’arte al MART nel 2012.

Ho cercato di capire perché la vicenda della giovane protagonista abbia stregato artisti e giovani lettori, per motivi alquanto diversi, dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri.

Ci sono quei libri che si incontrano da bambini e che diventano parte del percorso di crescita.

Quei libri sempre uguali ma al tempo stesso sempre diversi: ogni rilettura fa cogliere un nuovo particolare, una piccola scoperta ogni volta.

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

La spiegazione del successo di Alice forse sta nella lettura più semplice della storia: l’immaginazione come strumento di fuga temporanea dalla realtà che ognuno possiede, lo stimolo a ritrovare la capacità di osservare il mondo con gli occhi innocenti e curiosi dei bambini, una lezione più che mai attuale per i nostri tempi.

Oppure potrebbe essere il continuo stravolgimento a livello logico e semantico, la cura maniacale per la forma, i riferimenti alla Matematica, alla Fisica e alla Logica.

Non bisogna dimenticare che Lewis Carroll, considerato erroneamente autore di libri per l’infanzia, non era altro che Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, professore di Matematica a Oxford.

Una fiaba che dunque non sembra essere riservata esclusivamente ai giovani lettori: l’assenza di una morale chiara, un contenuto non proprio immediato come in altre fiabe, ma che lascia intravedere in essa una miriade di spunti estremamente interessanti. “Tutto ha una morale, basta saperla trovare”.

Come ci dice lo stesso Carroll, Cosimo Cherveddu

Historical background: The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

The term “Victorian” derives from Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne of Great Britain in 1837 when she was only 18, and she reigned for more than half a century. Even if there were some troubles, the Irish question, the social turmoils, the country achieved relative stability and in these years the British Empire reached its apogee, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India: in 1876 the empire covered a quarter of the earth’s land surface and a third of its population.

The Victorian Age was also called the “Age of Machinery” because the industrial revolution, which had started during the previous century, was in full swing.

The fast industrial development had high social costs, as overcrowding in the urban centres, bad sanitary conditions and exploitation of the workers, also called “the hands”. The separation between riches and poors was so deep that the Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, in 1845, spoke about “the two nations”.

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

This was a complex and contradictory era, characterized by a sort of social opposition between moral conventions of the Victorian compromise and the social degrade of the low classes. The wealthy middle class imposed their values: good manners, thrift, attention to external judgment, moralism, optimism, faith in God, in the family, in progress.

But this was the respectable side of the picture; the other side was represented by prostitution, illegitimacy and crime figures of the slums. A lot of men had frequently a “double life”.

Art made explicit that contradictions.

The author: Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was born in 1832 at Darebury, Cheshire, and he was the third child of an Anglican priest. He was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford. The young Charles was exceptionally gifted in mathematics and he won the Mathematical Lectureship in 1855. Despite early unhappiness, he was to remain at Christ Church, until his death. In 1861 Dodgson took deacon’s orders, but shyness and stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. In politics he was a Tory.

Dodgson never married but he was very fond of children, except boys, and spent much of his time with them.

For this reason, today there were suggestions of pedophilia on him. Dodgson was also a pioneering photographer, specializing in pictures of young girls.

He invented a great many mathematical and word puzzles, games and cipher methods. From a young age, he wrote short stories and satirical pamphlet on Oxford’s political and academic situation, but also mathematical works as Euclid and his modern rivals.

After the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll became the most famous nonsense writer of his time. He also published The hunting of the Snark, 1876, and Sylvie and Bruno, 1889. He died in 1898 of pneumonia.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the golden afternoon

In the prefatory poem, Carroll recalls the golden afternoon when he took the three Liddell sisters, Dean’s daughters, on an expedition up the Thames. The date was Friday, July 4, 1862. In this occasion, he invented and told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures. Carroll wrote a first version of the novel, with his own drawings, and gave it to his favorite girl, Alice Pleasance Liddell. Then he edited a new complete version of the novel and published it in 1865. In 1871 he published the sequel of Alice’s Adventures, Through the Looking-Glass.

The novel

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

The first book is set in Wonderland and has no real plot, in terms of the traditional novel: the events follow Alice’s actions and have not an organic development.

Instead the plot follows a dream-logic as Alice, the protagonist, falls asleep and dreams of falling down a rabbit hole into which she was chasing a White Rabbit that she has seen in the garden.

She entered in a surreal and illogical world whose nature and laws constantly change.

Alice too begins to change and her body grows up or shrinks depending on what she eats or drinks. In this world Alice meets a series of fantastic talking animals and other strange characters, as the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, The Duchess, the caterpillar, the King and the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat.

Each of these characters, on meeting Alice, appears to question the logic of everything she says or does and they themselves speak and act according to a bizarre invented logic, very different from what she was used to. Alice herself seems to have forgotten or confused everything she ever learned at school and she had an identity crisis: in some parts of the novel she cannot remember who she was.

When Alice entered in a wonderful garden, she finds the Queen of Hearts and her court of playing cards; they are playing a strange croquet match whose rules are invented by each one, while the queen constantly demands that one of her subjects be executed for some incomprehensible offence, even if no execution actually takes place.

The book ends with a trial to find out who has stolen some tarts that the queen has made; when Alice herself is called as a witness but she cannot speak due to an invented rule against her, she declares the whole thing absurd saying “you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”. Alice Liddell in a Carroll’s photography.

At this point she wakes up beside her elder sister to whom she tells about her dream.

Through the Looking-Glass

The tale takes off on November 4th exactly six months after the trip in Wonderland.

Alice enters in the other side of the mirror with her cat and finds an answer to her curiosity. Through the Looking-Glass, there is a world divided as chessboard: in fact the plot follows an imaginary chess match. She discovers a world in which all is reverted, as a poem, The Jabberwocky, readable only if reflected in a mirror.

Alice meets some chess pieces, strange insects, talking flowers, the bizarre twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the egg Humpty Dumpty, a Lion and a Unicorn. At the end, Alice becomes a Queen herself and wins the match, which dissolves into reality as it

Alice wakes up once more. This time Alice cannot explain who was dreaming: was her own dream, or she was a part in the dreaming of another?

Themes

Read simply as a children’s story the books are wonderful for their strange characters, mad inventions, parodies and poems. The novels are characterized by the lack of the moral.

At a deeper level, however, we can see that they have a lot of interesting themes. Carroll also questions the logic of the linguistic structures which govern our perception of the world and make communication possible.

The main themes of the novel are:

• Critic to the Victorian education, expressed by the rational thoughts of the young girl: Alice refers to her lessons and her education and she is very proud of the learning she has acquired, but it seems that the information she remembers is usually either completely useless or wrong.

Carroll makes a critique of the Utilitarian society which imposed a strict education based on facts and figures and condemned the use of imagination and creativity. The Duchess who claims there is a “moral” in everything is the caricature of the moralistic tendency of the Victorian values.

• The identity crisis of Alice, that cannot remember who she was, also because of her continuous changes of size. We can see this in many parts of the novel:

“How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? […] But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’” 1

“‘Who are YOU?’ said the Caterpillar. […]

Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I--I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’

‘I can’t explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.

Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.

1 L. Carroll, Edited by M. Gardner, p. 22

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’” 2

• The opposition between real and unreal, between facts and dreams.

While in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she understands she had a curious dream, in Through the Looking-Glass the question is more complicated. In Chapter 4 Alice meets Tweedledee, Tweedledum and the Red King, who is sleeping. Tweedledee says the Red King is dreaming about Alice,

“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?

Where I am now, of course, said Alice.

Not you! […] You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!

[…] You know very well you’re not real!

I am real!, said Alice, and began to cry.” 3

She cannot understand who is dreaming. A sort of regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King and so on, like two mirrors facing each other. “Which Dreamed It?”

The question returns at the end, in Chapter 12,

“Let’s consider who it was dreaming it all. This is a serious question, my dear. You see, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was a part of my dream, of course—but then I was a part of his dream, too! […]

Which do you think it was?” 4

The terminal poem, maybe Carroll’s best, he says in the last triplet:

Ever drifting down the stream

Lingering in the golden gleam

Life, what is it but a dream?

Carroll’s language between sense and nonsense

In Alice’s books conversational, semantic and logical anomalies take place.