Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Leading Alice


There is an amazing rendering of Alice in Wonderland by Jan Svankmajer. If you get a chance to rent it and haven't had your daily fill of weirdness, this film is fascinating. I had to watch it in art during eighth grade and it was pretty frightening.



I wonder if Charles Dodgson knew into how many languages his masterpiece would be translated. Alice in Wonderland isn’t exactly written in English (even nineteenth century British English) as it is. Dodgson was a mathematics teacher at Oxford and a logician on the side so he was always thinking in languages other than English. (If there’s one thing I’ve learned from logic class this year, it’s that the semantics of the English language cannot be fully represented by symbolic logic and that symbolic systems oversimplify and cannot accurately depict reality.) Speaking in numbers or with ontological connectives or in Jabberwocky then was not so awkward to Dodgson. Lewis Carroll (for I am now speaking of the author rather than the person) created his own language in order to tell the story inspired by Alice Liddle, a young girl with whom he could revisit the language of childhood, the language of imagination, which “somehow speaks to us on a deeper level” (Brian Anderson).



Today at the Henry Ransom Center, I saw “Jabberwocky” and “The Mouse’s Tale” performed in Spanish, German, Japanese, Latin, and French and the Alice texts in a handful of other languages. The sounds of the different oral patterns telling the same stories were fascinating. In a world that is becoming ever more multicultural and striving to find unity in diversity, this is the sort of multilingual dialogue world leaders should be able to have. Even if an international representative cannot speak twelve languages, he or she must have tolerance – much more than tolerance – intelligent tolerance, skills of interpersonal human understanding, the ability to communicate across cultural barriers. Even though Ryan didn’t know precisely what Charlotte was saying – she was speaking in German – he was able to interpret the piece by the amount of time elapsed, the cadence of her voice, and the sounds of concocted English words translated into concocted German. “The Alice stories are certainly more than just books” (Brian Anderson). They have touched lives all over the world, effecting a “spooky action at a distance” (690), just as new leaders of a globalized society must do. If I ever attend an international conference, I want it to sound as colorful and diverse as our recitations of Alice, and hopefully the product will be more than gibberish and jabberish.


The multilingual world spanned by Alice's charm.



Alice is the only human child in Wonderland and is forced into the position of being “her own hero” (691A). Though she hits the ground after tumbling down the rabbit hole, it takes her most of the story (the same is true when she dissolves through the looking glass) to find her feet. Nothing makes sense. Alice is given “advice from a caterpillar” (Alice 47) who smokes hookah, converses with a bodiless smile in a tree, and runs a thirty-minute circular race as a means of drying off (because listening to dullest history recitation isn’t effective). But through this, Alice learns to assert herself, to find strength in who she is, to find relative stability in the ever tossing sea of insanity that she has fallen into. Alice has no choice but to “follow [her] intuition” (81), and exercise that most definitely helps “to clarify [her] personal vision” (80). 



There is a definite parallel between Alice’s descent and the fall from home down the college hole. I struggle, just as Alice does, to find balance. Alice consumes various potions (“drink me”) and bites various cakes and mushrooms in order to change her size. When she wants to fit through mouse-sized door she alternately becomes far too tall and then just the right size but without the requisite key. I can focus on one class or one aspect of my life and inflate impressively in that domain. But alas, the door behind which lies the garden is too small for even my shoe to fit through. And so I shrink, forgetting the key I took from say, logic class, in order to steal through the doorway into DB land. Alice does at last figure out just the right amount to chew off. If her courageous expeditions through wonderland are not an example for me to follow, they are at least a comfort for me to imagine. Both Alice and I have been displaced; Alice persisted, grew, and made it through; so can I. I will continue to work through this process of shrinking and expanding, and I will learn slowly how much of each mushroom I should bite off.