Lewis Carroll’s influence on literature and popular culture since the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) has been nothing short of astonishing. After Shakespeare, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) has become the world’s most quoted author. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into 176 languages worldwide; and furthermore, it is the most frequently retranslated book in existence. There are over 400 versions in Spanish, 500 in French and German; and at least 100 each in several other major European languages.
The greatest technician of language in the twentieth century, James Joyce, saw in Carroll/Dodgson’s manipulations, inventions and coinages of words and language, a kindred linguistic genius. Consequently in Finnegans Wake we may discover Joyce’s holy trinity of the “Dodgfather, Dogson and Coo” in hundreds of references to “Dadgerson’s dodges” in multiple forms, such as: “Wonderland’s wanderlad,” “Lew’d carol” on the “Wonderlawn” accompanied by “a tiny victorienne Alys” who is the “alias Alis, alas, who broke the glass!” Joyce even implies his novel – jabberwocky-wise – may be “jesta jibberweek’s joke.”
Among many others, Carroll’s influence has been acknowledged in the writing of Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov – the first Russian translator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Indeed, it is difficult not to see Carroll’s influence in Nabokov’s flamboyant style with its double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams and coinages. The real-life Dodgson can easily be viewed as a shockingly contrary-wise inspiration for Humbert Humbert: the middle-aged college professor sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl in Nabokov’s Lolita.
As evidenced by Nabokov’s novel, and despite the family-oriented charm of Walt Disney’s hugely popular Alice in Wonderland, there was a definite shift in perspective on Alice after the mid-twentieth century. No longer seen strictly as a children’s fairy tale in popular culture, films and literature, Alice drifted off in directions not even remotely imagined by Dodgson.
From the sixties onward, much attention was given to the psychedelic aspects of Alice in Wonderland. From music by the Jefferson Airplane’s fantastic White Rabbit, John Lennon’s I Am The Walrus and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, to Aerosmith’s Sunshine and Natalia Kills’ Wonderland, on to an avalanche of films, books and visual artists’ portrayals of Alice and Wonderland that have varied from the surreal to the entirely pornographic. While through the eighties and nineties, all manner of genres and modes were devised, from steampunk and cyberpunk to gothic horror and science fiction. Who could have predicted the popularity of the new millennium’s American McGee’s Alice psychological horror action-adventure video games; or by contrast the plastic building-block toymaker Lego Alice in Wonderland video game. Not to mention that eBay would offer Naughty Zombie Alice Halloween costumes, and a licensed marijuana product purveyor in Alaska would dub itself “Absolem’s Garden” after the blue, hooka-smoking caterpillar in Tim Burton’s near-hallucinogenic 2010 cinematic rendering of the classic tale.
It seems we all know something about Alice and Wonderland, but like Alice herself upon her first reading of Jabberwocky, we find: “It fills my head with ideas, but I don’t know what they are.” So as each new generation falls under Carroll’s word spells, each in turn must attempt to understand what Alice and Wonderland might mean in the context of their world and in their time.
Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland is a collection of twenty-first century stories inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Snark; and to some degree: aspects of the life of the author, Charles Dodgson, and the real-life Alice (Liddell).
Elizabeth Hosang’s story “No Reality But What We Make” is a title that might have been applied to many of the imaginings in this anthology. It would also be in keeping with Lewis Carroll’s perspective as an early member of the London-based Society of Psychical Research, a first of its kind in the world.
“I have supposed a Human being capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness,” Carroll once mused, as he suggested that entities might exist that “sometimes were visible to us, and we to them, and that they were sometimes able to assume human form… by actual transference of their material essence.”
All the stories in Alice Unbound, to a greater and lesser degree, “delve into the aspects of the human psyche” in various forms and on a number of levels. These stories range from tales of childhood horror to drug-induced sexual nightmares. There is a surreal Oxford academic detective story and the tragic tale of a shell-shocked soldier in the Great War trenches in France. There are futuristic travellers tales with teleporting jabberwocks, boojams and interplanetary Snarks. There are dark conspiracies with biological weapons and gene smugglers, satires and comic cannibal stories. All manner of refugees from Wonderland are let loose in this anthology, even the rock and roll tale of a struggling Wonderband.
In her introduction to Alice Unbound, Colleen Anderson rightly observes: “The vein of madness runs so pure through this anthology…” That same vein of madness not only ran through Lewis Carroll’s creative world in Wonderland, but it also rather darkly ran though Dodgson’s real life. Ironically, his favourite uncle Skeffington Lutwidge was a Commissioner of Lunacy who was killed by an asylum patient. It also has been suggested that Carroll’s very peculiar character and genius may in part be explained by his suffering from a mild form of autism, known as Asperger’s Syndrome.
Be that as it may, in a truly bizarre example of life imitating art, Carroll’s literary child Alice has been posthumously diagnosed with her very own psychosis. The real-world symptoms for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) are straight out of Carroll’s novel and include: hallucinations, lost sense of time and an altered self-image where certain body parts appear disproportionate to the rest of the body.
Nearly all of the stories in this collection share a sinister shifting sense of reality akin to some aspects of this syndrome (or “Sin-Drum” as Dominik Parisien’s River Street Witch insists) that very well may be related to the often surreal and chaotic times we find ourselves in today. Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland reveals the authors’ collective cathartic need to embrace Alice at this time in our history when we appear to have passed through Alice’s Looking Glass and entered the very real madness of “Trump World.” Every day we wake up to see what our modern-day Mad Hatter has tweeted. And we can only scratch our heads at the day-to-day shifting sense of (sur)reality that has become our daily news-feed reality show.
As Alice did when she tumbled down the rabbit hole, we have come to accept the abnormal as normal, a world in which distinctions mean little or nothing. A world in which lies have no consequence, which means that truth has no consequence, which means that irreality is reality, which means that “Life is, but a dream…”