Carroll vs. Tenniell Illustrations

As I examined the illustrations by Tenniel and Dodgson, the first thing I noticed was the lack of a drawing of tall Alice with the pigeon after she eats the wrong side of the mushroom. When I was reading this section in The Annotated Alice, I had a hard time visualizing the anxiety and despair of the pigeon. She’s just a tall girl. How in the world could the pigeon mistake her for the serpent? Did she really look that different? My brain clearly lacks a strong right-side for “in the right-hemisphere mode of information processing, we use intuition and have leaps of insight—moments when ‘everything seems to fall into place’ without figuring things out in a logical order. When this occurs, people often spontaneously exclaim, ‘I’ve got it!’ or ‘Ah, yes, now I see the picture’” (230). I never had that moment where the idea of the pigeon fell into place with a picture in my mind. Instead, the pictures Dodgson provided greatly enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of the story. He is a far better illustrator than my mind could ever hope to be. My concern with the lack of a pigeon-picture being the dominate factor in my comparison as opposed to subtle differences between the pictures has made me realize my lack of “imaging: seeing an imaginary picture with your mind’s eye. The brain is able to conjure an image and then ‘look’ at it, ‘seeing’ it as if it is ‘really there’” (232). With my apparent missing of right-side capabilities, I sometimes wonder if I was dropped on my head as a child for “just as damage to a particular region of the left hemisphere impairs speech, producing aphasia, so damage to a particular region of the right hemisphere impairs our ability to express or even interpret what we feel, producing what he has labeled aprodosia” (220).

Is there hope for people like me who are dominated by the left sides of their brain? In our anthology, I found the possibility of a brighter future in Rico’s recognition that “to know something aesthetically means, as already suggested: (1) consciousness of a unified whole in which our usual preoccupation with particulars has been released; (2) consciousness of a sense of pleasure, the result of having discovered or fashioned form and order out of the chaotic acts and facts of the world” (223). Perhaps this course’s goals, a return to childhood and unity of thought, will bring the right-side of my brain up to speed with the left-side of my brain.