"Literary Nonsense". That's exactly how I felt while reading Lewis Carrolls' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and trying to comprehend all the metaphors and innuendos. Wonderland is considered to be one of the best examples of the Literary Nonsense genre. The novel, written in 1865, uses sensical and nonsensical elements to defy language conventions or logical reasoning.
The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. Nonsense is often humorous in nature, although its humor is derived from its nonsensical nature, as opposed to most humor which is funny because it does make sense. Even before I knew that Wonderland was an example of this genre, I knew there was something under the surface of every flamingo croquet stick and deck of cards.
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym for Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Wonderland was a story of his own imagination told to another Reverend and three young girls (one of them being Alice Liddell) while on a row boat trip up the Isis in Oxford, England in 1862. The story featured a bored little girl named Alice who went looking for an adventure.
The three girls loved the story and Alice asked Dodgson to write it down for her. Prompting Dodgson to begin the original manuscript, Alice's Adventures Under Ground. In 1864, he presented Alice with this copy as a Christmas gift and was already planning to expand the story for publication.
The story is in fact about a girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure. While sitting with her sister on the riverbank, she follows a talking, clothed white rabbit with a pocket watch down a rabbit hole into Wonderland.
She encounters liquids and cakes that make her grow and shrink, a hookah smoking caterpillar, a Mad Hatter and his never ending tea party, plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts and attends a trial concerning missing tarts. These are just a few pieces of the novel and the expansion for publication notably added the infamous tea party and the character of the Cheshire Cat.
As far as deeper meaning, it's my opinion that all art is open to interpretation. You can take any metaphor or character and contract your own insight. There are some pretty strong opinions floating around concerning the meaning of the richly animated pages of Carroll's book though.
There are also some readers who have suggested that there are many references to mathematical concepts in the story since Dodgson was a mathematician at Christ Church in Oxford.
And there are many forms of art, music, video, and literature that have been inspired by this tale. It's such a rich tale of imagination that it's easy to find inspiration in any page. Wonderland will serve as inspiration this week during my Storybook features.
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