Research Report: Annotating Carroll's Alice

By Robin Chin, Alice Adaptation Team

Fig-1 John Tenniel's Illustration of the "White Rabbit"

Abstract

Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice combines Lewis Carroll’s two most famous works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and adds to them numerous annotations with information about Carroll’s life, as well as about both books’ publication histories. Gardner includes these annotations ostensibly in order to help modern readers better understand the original experience of reading Carroll’s works. However, by allowing such contextual knowledge to infiltrate and overwhelm the margins of the edited text, one may argue that Gardner seeks surreptitiously to reinforce the more iconic and “puzzling” experience of reading Alice, and of the textual medium.

Description

First published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a work of Victorian juvenile fiction in which the main character, a seven year-old girl, finds herself temporarily lost within a strange “Wonderland” of anthropomorphic animals, surprisingly literal linguistic puns, and general nonsense logic. The text opens, however, in the “real world” – with a sleepy Alice sitting beside a riverbank with her unnamed elder sister. While this sister silently reads an unspecified book that has, Alice notes with some derision, “no pictures or conversations in it” (25), Alice’s attention is caught by the sudden appearance of a white rabbit, who seems blessed with not only the unexpected ability to talk, but with the unique possession of a pocket-watch and waist-coat (see Fig-1). Intrigued by this unusual animal, Alice attempts to follow it, which eventually leads her to crawl down a large rabbit-hole and, unknowingly, enter into the realm of Wonderland. The rest of the text describes Alice’s eclectic adventures as she unmethodically investigates the curious places and people of the area; a loose pattern of plot, but one which clearly culminates with Alice’s encounter with the two-dimensional matriarch of Wonderland, the fiery-tempered “Queen of Hearts.” Indeed, having attempted and failed to participate properly in the Queen’s corrupt and chaotic game of flamingo-hedgehog croquet, as well as in the courtroom scene that immediately (and illogically) follows it, Alice becomes suddenly disenchanted with the whimsy and unpredictability of Wonderland. “Who cares for you?” she declares, addressing the assembled royal court. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (161). This declaration seems to break to spell of Wonderland for Alice, as she suddenly finds herself on the verge of being smothered by the now whirling, un-anthropomorphized card pack. At the last moment, however, Alice is saved from peril by her sister’s voice, which calls her to “wake up” into reality. She does awake, unharmed but still excited, and proceeds to tell her sister “all these strange adventures of hers that you [the reader] have just been reading about” (162). The book ends with the beginning of another dream, as Alice’s sister, beginning to doze, pictures an adult Alice someday telling her own children stories of Wonderland, and nostalgically reveling in their “simple joys” (164). Notably, this “dream-within-a-dream motif” appears once again, six years later, in Carroll’s similarly eclectic sequel to Alice’s Adventures: the vaguely chess based Through the Looking-Glass.

Fig-2 Comparison of the Number of Annotations Included in Alice's Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass

As an edition, Martin Gardner’s 1960 compilation of Carroll’s two Alice texts is quite unique, in that it introduces a staggering 205 annotations to the original texts and illustrations – 76 annotations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and 129 for Through the Looking-Glass (see Fig-2 above for details). Indeed, in the edition’s introduction, Gardner discusses the necessity of annotating Carroll’s text in order for modern audiences to understand the “very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, written for British readers of another century” (7). While, he claims, to the untrained reader, Carroll’s nonsense may seem to be the result of mere whimsy, “the fact is that [this nonsense] is not nearly as random and pointless as it seems” (7). At the same time, however, while Gardner emphasizes the deep intention behind Carroll’s many puns and linguistic jokes, he takes pains in his introduction to defend the author against the various interpretations of psychoanalytic critics, who are understandably attracted to the dreamy premise of both texts.  Likewise, he also acknowledges and rejects the validity of past critics’ speculation with regards to Carroll’s sexual attraction to young girls, such as to the “real Alice,” Alice Liddell. Gardner concludes his introduction by reemphasizing the importance of the nonsense in the texts: “[Carroll’s last level of metaphor is] that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician” (20).

Commentary

Considered for the moment solely in terms of Carroll’s two original texts, Gardner’s The Annotated Alice is already an extremely rich and complicated work, which raises numerous issues and perplexing questions in connection with our team’s interest in rules, play, and textual adaptation. For example, as texts first published just after the height of the Victorian Age - an era in British history often characterized by its general concern with "rules" and social propriety - both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are striking for their respective, incredibly inventive means of referencing and reversing other nineteenth century cultural texts, from parlor games and nursery rhymes to famous and respected works of "high" art. Carroll, by playing with these different media and incorporating them into his literary texts, set an early example with regards to the incredible value in flexing the boundaries of the written word, and using this to venture into new imaginative categories of written thought and meaning. However, while Carroll certainly stretched many of "the rules" within his Alice texts, one cannot but notice that his works continue simultaneously to accept, if not promote, other levels of formal or informal limitation - some even borrowed unnecessarily from the same "adapted" texts mentioned previously. This seemingly contradictory set of impulses, a sort of “double logic of remediation” as described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, places both original texts in a uniquely privileged position with respect to their further adaptation by later authors, artists, and –quite importantly – textual editors.

Fig-3 A Sample Page from a Revised Edition of Gardner's 1960 Edition

Indeed, when itself considered as a modern adaptation of Carroll’s famous nineteenth century texts, Gardner’s 1960 edition of the two Alice works becomes an even more complicated and valuable object for the purposes of our team’s project. For example, while on one hand Gardner claims in his introduction that his goal as editor is simply to preserve the “very curious, complicated kind of nonsense” that Victorian readers understood and experienced in Carroll’s day, his copious annotation of the original texts belies the “messiness” and ultimate impossibility of ever fully achieving this task. Flipping through the edition’s pages, one finds that many annotations, meant to clarify the logic of the text, seem instead to crowd the original words in an uncomfortable, if not overwhelming way (see Fig-3).  In the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass alone, Gardner’s includes no less than thirty-six annotations – a mass of information that literally sweeps away the chapter entirely for five consecutive pages (192-6). As such, like Alexander Pope’s highly idiosyncratic annotation of his own Dunciad Varorium, Gardner’s efforts to elucidate the complexities of Carroll’s Alice works result simultaneously in the surreptitious celebration of the text’s puzzling and irrepressible complexity. In the end, one is forced to accept that some meaning is irrevocably lost in the uninterrupted reading of Carroll’s novels, just as one must alternatively accept that some subtle semblance of sense is lost in perusing the editor’s textual annotations.

While this specifically literary conundrum of intertextual translation may be problematically narrow for the purposes of our team’s “adaptation project,” I believe that we can circumvent such limitations by examining how these same issues arise for editors of other Alice-inspired, non-literary works. As Jerome McGann suggests in his essay “The Rationale of Hypertext,” by translating a textual work (and critical question) into a different physical medium, one may yet move in a productive way beyond “the logical structures … of the material being analyzed” (21).

Resources for Further Study

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 3- 50.

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Ed. by Martin Gardner. New York: Bramhall House, 1960.

-----------------. More Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Ed. by Martin Gardner. New York: Random House, 1990.

Hill, W. Speed. “The Theory and Practice of Transcription.” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991. Edited by W. Speed Hill.  Binghamton: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993. 91-125.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

McGann, Jerome. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Edited by Kathryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 19-45.

Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.