Meraviglie nel Mondo di Alice, tesina

Meraviglie nel mondo di 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. Carrol 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

 loss of I

because 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.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,

While in she understands she had a

Through the Looking-Glass

curious dream, in 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

“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you

about Alice,

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 the 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.

Throughout the Alice books, Carroll demonstrates his far-seeing, exhaustive

competence in language, systematically exploiting every possible ambiguity of

meaning. The story takes place in artificial environments in order to have the

maximum level of misunderstanding and to obstruct reciprocal comprehension

between the speakers. Wonderland “don’t seem to have any rules in particular:

at least, if there are, nobody attends to them” .

5

Carroll made it through the laugh, because “Laughter, declares Reinhold

Niebuhr, is a kind of no man’s land between faith and despair. We preserve our

sanity by laughing at life’s surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to

2 L. Carroll, op.cit. p.49

The Annotated Alice, Through the Looking-Glass,

3 L. Carroll, p. 198

4 L. Carroll, op. cit., p. 285

5 L.Carroll, op.cit p.90

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and

death” 6

In this way Carroll uses nonsense as instrument to describe the lack of

communication in real life and to criticize the Rationalism of his time. The

nonsense is based on the juxtaposition of Order and Chaos, using logic and

rational elements to describe absurd and meaningless situations.

According to the critic Wim Tigges the effect of nonsense is caused by an

excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. Others important techniques used

by Carroll are: the internal monologue of Alice (through which we can know the

thoughts and the psychology of the protagonist), the dialogues and the

there

parodies of famous poems and nursery rhymes, the portmanteau-words (“

are two meanings packed up into one world”).

These games of linguistic logic imply a specific knowledge of the culture of

Victorian age.

But no joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has

to be explained. The Duchess is the caricature of the moralistic tendency of

“take care of the sense, and the sounds will

the Victorian values, when she said

take care of themselves”. The novel did not have a “moral”, and for this reason

also this slogan is a parody: that is a distortion of two “p” into two “s” of the

“Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of

English proverb :

themselves”.

In both Alice’s books there are a lot of nonsense examples:

“-The patriotic archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable.

- Found what?, said the Duck

-Found it-the mouse replied rather crossly- of course you know what ‘it’

means

-I know what it means well enough[…] The question is, what did the

archbishop find?” 7

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse.

-It’s a long tail, certainly –said Alice looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s

tail- but why do you call it sad?” 8

“-I believe I can guess that, she added aloud

-Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?, said the March

Here went on

-I do -Alice hastily replied- at least, at least I mean what I say, that’s the same

thing, you know

-Not the same thing a bit!, said the Hatter. Why, you might just as well say that

“I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!

6 M. Gardner, Preface to Definitive Ed. of Annotated Alice. It is a quotation of R.

Discerning the Signs of the Times - Sermons for Today and Tomorrow

Niebuhr, The Annotated Alice,

7 L. Carroll, Ed. By M.Gardner, p.31

8 L. Carrol, op.cit, p. 35

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

The peak of attention about language is reached in Chapter 6 of Through the

Looking-Glass, with the character of Humpty Dumpty:

“- My name is Alice, but –

- It’s a stupid name enough! – Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently – What

does it mean?

- Must a name mean something?, Alice asked doubtfully

- Of course it must –Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh – my name means

the shape I am[…] With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.[…]

There’s glory for you!

- I don’t know what do you mean by “glory”, Alice said.

- Of course you don’t, till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down

argument for you”!

- But glory doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”, Alice objected.

- When I use a word […] it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more

nor less.

- The question is –said Alice – whether you can make words mean so many

different things.

- The question is –said Humpty Dumpty – which is to be master, that’s all”. 9

just as if it was a game.

Humpty Dumpty talks about language a game.

That’s the core of the matter, the heart of the speech for Carroll:

Una volta o due aveva provato a sbirciare

il libro che la sorella leggeva,ma non c’erano

figure né dialoghi, “e a che serve un libro” aveva

pensato Alice “senza figure e senza dialoghi?” 10

Lewis Carroll capiva perfettamente le esigenze dei suoi giovani lettori e si

occupò personalmente delle illustrazioni del manoscritto originale, che regalò

ad Alice Liddell, sua fonte di ispirazione.

Per la prima edizione al pubblico del 1965 affidò le illustrazioni a Sir John

Tenniel, illustratore inglese noto in patria grazie alle sue vignette satiriche nelle

Punch.

colonne della rivista

Dodgson teneva molto alla veste grafica del testo e all’aspetto estetico del

volume. I progetti in cui indicò precisamente in quali punti inserire le

illustrazioni dimostrano la cura meticolosa che dedicava alla presentazione del

prodotto finito.

Dunque, il racconto non è tanto un testo nell’accezione ristretta del termine,

ovvero lettere

9 L. Carroll, op. cit, pp. 219, 221, 224

Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie.

10 L.Carroll, Ed. annotata da M.Gardner. Trad. M.D’Amico.

Rizzoli 2010. p.37

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice e parole collegate a formare delle frasi, quanto

un complesso insieme testuale-iconografico in

cui due differenti livelli sono indissolubilmente

intrecciati in una narrazione multimediale.

Le immagini che interagiscono con il testo

trasformano i racconti di Alice in un’opera d’arte

totale in cui il lavoro intellettuale e gli strumenti

della produzione libraria si intrecciano.

Il primo movimento artistico che si confrontò

con la figura di Alice fu il Surrealismo. Questo

perché l’interesse surrealista per il sogno, regno

parallelo non soggetto alle tradizionali leggi

della natura né ai limiti della ragione umana, è

S.Dalì, A Mad un chiaro parallelismo con le situazioni che Alice

Tea Party , 1969 sperimenta durante i suoi viaggi onirici nel

Paese delle Meraviglie e nel Mondo oltre lo specchio.

Nell’opera di Dodgson, come in molte opere surrealiste, lo straniamento e l’uso

distorto

degli oggetti quotidiani in una situazione di perenne nonsense diventano

strumento artistico per destabilizzare l’oggettività presunta della realtà e le

convenzioni che l’idea stessa di realtà presume.

Ai loro occhi Carroll appariva un precursore intellettuale del surrealismo, uno

spirito affine i cui personaggi e mondi letterari sembravano prefigurare molte

delle loro prospettive antirazionaliste.

Alcuni artisti alludono già nei titoli alla fonte carrolliana a cui si sono ispirati,

Alice au Pays des Merveilles, Alice

come Renè Magritte in Max Ernst nella serie

o in varie opere letterarie di Andrè Breton e Paul Eluard.

In particolare, è l’eclettica figura di Salvador Dalì che è

collegabile al capolavoro carrolliano. Il pittore di

R.Magritte, Alice au Figueres realizzò nel 1969 alcune stampe per

pays des merveilles, accompagnare una nuova edizione del libro, ma

1946 l’influenza del personaggio di Alice nella sua

produzione artistica è presente anche in alcune sculture

Destino,

e nel cortometraggio realizzato per W.Disney e

pubblicato solo nel 2003.

Le affinità con i tempi tanto cari a Carroll, come il

(La persistenza della memoria,

dilatarsi del tempo 1931)

(Sogno causato

e l’interesse per la dimensione onirica

dal volo di un’ape, 1944). O, ancora, l’ossessione quel mondo sconosciuto che

Meraviglie nel mondo di Alice

La Venere a cassetti)

è l’inconscio (la scultura per l’opposizione fra reale e

irreale, e perfino per le uova, come testimonia il suo Teatro-Museo di Figueres!

A questo punto è d’obbligo soffermarsi sulla serie delle opere cosiddette