The Further Adventures of Alice

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF

There have been a number of follow-on stories to the Alice saga plus some stories which adapt the basic plots and characters but weave their own pattern from these elements. Here are a few of them.

Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland
edited by Richard Peabody
Cover painting (right) "Malice in Wonderland," by Julie Inman

   “Alice Redux is a potent and heady brew; conveying a surreal and intense array of atmospheres and phantasmagorical takes on the original tale, this is a collection by some of the finest and most imaginative writers around. Alice proves to be a Muse in hairband and pinafore; this collection of Alice in Wonderland inspired stories should most definitely be labelled Drink Me.”
-- Joolz Denby, author of Billie Morgan

   “Drawing their inspiration from the imaginative feast that is Alice in Wonderland, these stories are by turns funny, moving, and best of all, startling; each surprises in its own way, and each allows us to inhabit, for a little while longer, a world we didn't even realize we missed.”
– Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel

   “Alice--the hippest girl in Victorian England, the first postmodern heroine--is back, reflected in the looking-glasses of some of the most imaginative writers of our day. Many of my favorites are here--Carter, Coover, Ducornet, Olsen, Sheehan--as well as some intriguing strangers. (And Nancy Taylor's photographs had me fainting in coils.) The literary Alice exerts the same fascination on the contributors that Alice Liddell did on Lewis Carroll, liberating the imagination, loosening the tongue. This is a superb anthology, a Wonderland of fiction wild and new.”
--Steven Moore, editor and critic

ISBN 0-931181-22-4 : 250 pages : limited to 1000 copies : published 2005

LOOKING GLASS VARIATIONS
Reflections on Alice fill a USC exhibition and a recent anthology

~ by ANTHONY MILLER ~

How could we envision a world without Alice? One of the most endearing and enduring characters in literature, Lewis Carroll’s heroine still accompanies us on our journeys through all manner of wonderlands. During an 1862 boat ride down the Isis river, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – deacon, Oxford don, mathematician, logician, photographer, temporal-lobe epileptic, and children’s storyteller – began telling stories to Alice Pleasance Liddell, the girl who would lend her name to our guide through an unparalleled and everlasting terrain of the imagination. Since then, the delightfully confounding realms the author created for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There under the name of Lewis Carroll have been subjects for countless studies and tributes, parodies and performances.

Alice’s conversations with the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle, and the rest of Carroll’s menagerie have exerted an incalculable effect on the substance of the nature of fantasy and the language we use to describe it. “Carroll is the don of comic reduction: shrink the essence of authority to a child’s scale, diminish the threatening urgencies of society, make jokes of them, show up their triviality – those are his imperatives,” writes literary critic Robert Polhemus.

What endures about Alice’s story is her irrepressible enthusiasm to embrace the contradictions and confusions that would seem to be best met only with sheer bewilderment, her tenacious reason and poise as her surroundings become “curiouser and curiouser.” Alice’s excursions have bequeathed to us an essential child’s garden of puns, puzzles, paradoxes, and portmanteau words. The figure of Alice has made her way from Victoriana to psychedelia and beyond. How might we investigate the secret of this little English girl’s continuing appeal and influence?

One destination for delving into this and many other questions about the role of the character and the genius of the author is The Curious World of Lewis Carroll, an exhibition in the Treasure Room at USC’s Doheny Library through May 24. This small, marvelous show features books and other materials from the G. Edward Cassady and Margaret Elizabeth Cassady Lewis Carroll Collection donated by George Cassady. The Cassady Collection has even recently endowed an annual prize at the university for scholarly as well as artistic explorations into Carroll’s works.

Curious World includes first British and American editions of the Alice books. The volumes on display also celebrate the many illustrators of Carroll’s books, from the first and foremost Alice interpreter John Tenniel to such artists as Helen Oxenbury, Mervyn Peake, and Ralph Steadman. One vitrine contains a 1969 Through the Looking-Glass illustrated by Salvador Dali and other limited-edition artists’ renderings of the Alice books, while another accumulates a number of international editions, including a 1975 translation into the aboriginal language of Pitjantjatjara called Alitji in the Dreamtime. Also on view are early editions of Carroll’s other literary works, such as The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in 8 Fits and his two-book fantasy Sylvie and Bruno.

The exhibition incorporates some of Carroll’s photographs, selections from his carefully compiled correspondence, and the mathematical texts he published as Charles Dodgson, such as Euclid and His Modern Rivals. Clips from every cinematic version of Alice’s story, from a 1903 silent to such contemporary films as Dennis Potter’s Dreamchild and Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s haunting Alice, play on a monitor. Two cabinets in the exhibition examine “Carroll’s Legacy” and how the author’s creations have come into our own time in a number of extra-literary manifestations. Alice’s myriad appearances in other fictions, artworks, films, television programs, and music videos could easily have been the subject of an entire exhibit of its own. Will Brooker’s 2004 study Alice’s Adventures has pursued Alice’s pop-cultural incarnations over the last few decades, including toys, literary societies, theme parks, cartoons, and computer games.

In Richard Peabody’s anthology Alice Redux: Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland (Paycock Press, paperback, $15.95), 31 authors reflect upon the adventures of Alices both real and imaginary, Alice Liddell’s sisters, Lewis Carroll’s life and work, and the other denizens of Carroll’s books. The first compilation of Alice-inspired tales since Carolyn’s Sigler’s Alternative Alices, an anthology of fictional explorations from writers of the late 1800s through the 1920s, Alice Redux is an audacious collection of fictions that expand our appreciation of Alice and her creator. These stories and excerpts from novels ponder the prevailing preoccupations of the Alice books: names, games, dreams, rules, and the wonderful forms of nonsense that can arise out of them all.

From Julie Inman’s painting “Malice in Wonderland” – picturing a fully grown Alice brandishing a revolver after shooting down the White Rabbit – on the cover, it’s immediately clear that this is more than a merely reverential compilation of homages to Alice. Steven Millhauser’s “Alice, Falling” contemplates the particulars of Alice’s protracted plummet down the rabbit hole. Lance Olsen genuflects on the veneration of an Alice known as “Our Lady of the Mirror.” Kevin Downs relates a story in which one White Rabbit is an old VW. In a section from Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice, his surreal valentine to Carroll’s writings, the Vurt author has Alice come face-to-face with her writer and a cybernetic sister Celia as she travels through a future Manchester. A fragment from Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet offers a memory of Dodgson through a girl’s eyes.

n “Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock,” master fairy-tale refabricator Robert Coover imagines a much more mature Alice, frustrated with the level of imagination that remains in Wonderland. Several stories explore our expanding conceptions of Alice as a symbol for the lost little girl, or, as Peabody characterizes her in his introduction, “Alice the naïve, the passive, the imperiled, the curious, the acted upon by weird reality.” Recurring questions about how Alice Liddell should be understood as a muse, a fetish object, or a victim of some Victorian Svengali of literature form the subject of stories. Beth Bachman briefly considers Carroll’s case against the Supreme Court’s rulings on virtual child pornography. Other stories examine links between Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud as Jeffrey M. Bockman wrestles with how the author is transmuted in academia and Bruce Bauman listens in on Alice’s sister Lorina’s analysis session. Doug Rice looks at the relationships between Alice and her sisters. Miles David Moore imagines Alice getting hitched to another eternally young literary character, Huckleberry Finn, and traveling with him down the Mississippi. Angela Carter’s “Alice in Prague, or the Curious Room” finds its inspiration in Svankmajer’s Alice. Nancy Taylor’s photographs throughout the book, of a girl’s bestockinged legs dangling from chairs and trees, speak to those who will never relinquish the images of themselves as overgrown Alices.

Looking at the Curious World and reading Alice Redux, we realize that our attachment to Alice says as much about how we grapple with our realities as it does about how we grapple with our fantasies. Lewis Carroll’s brilliant and inexhaustible trove of stories invites us to places where absurdity illuminates and nonsense is the only real way to make sense. Alice beckons us to go with her, to once again become a child of irrepressible curiosity, and to wander into wonder.

Reprinted from the LOS ANGELES CITY BEAT

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