Does Alice really fall into “Wonderland”?
No. It’s a nightmare; a very distressing book but at the same time very funny. I thought a lot about Buster Keaton who, in his films, keeps falling, getting scared, hurting himself while managing to make people laugh without losing his sinister splendor. Lewis Carroll’s humor is based on a form of absurdity, accepting the apparent paradox of being both distressing and funny. Moreover, Alice, at the beginning of the story, like Buster Keaton, takes a huge fall down the rabbit hole. She “fall, fall, fall” in a well which ultimately has a bottom and a door.
Speaking of anxiety: Lewis Carroll had a strange passion for photographing little girls. On France Culture, you declare: “I would not have spent six months of my life with a rapist”.
Indeed. We’ll never know. There are no records in his journals (certain pages were conveniently torn out, Editor’s note). A tradition existed in the Victorian era of taking photos of little girls dressed in veils, disguised as fairies, vaguely naked – a tradition which I obviously do not support – but this is the territory that Carroll ventures into. In my eyes, it is not a monster, it is rather symptomatic of the male gaze of the time on little girls. My firm conviction is that all of this remained a fantasy. However, it is impossible to be sure. Alice’s mother, who initially supported the sessions between her daughters and the writer, ended up putting an end to them, probably because it would have been inappropriate for young girls, now pubescent, to be left behind. custody of a single adult.
Marwan Chahine autopsy the spark from which the civil war in Lebanon arose
How do you imagine Lewis Carroll?
I can’t really imagine it. Alice interests me infinitely more than her creator. Being a translator does not mean becoming a specialist in an author. In this sense, my biographical knowledge remains vague: he was a mathematician, a professor, an eternal bachelor and – to be honest – I am not sure I found him very endearing.
Is Alice dreaming? At the beginning of the story, in fact, she seems to be struggling to fall asleep.
She is in the sleep of dreams, the hypnagogic state, which favors the emergence of images. In my book Not sleeping (POL, 2021), I note that healthy sleepers spend a few moments in this zone, when falling asleep. If waking up suddenly occurs, the memory of these strange images persists. My type of insomnia means that I never completely fall asleep, suffering from hypervigilance, which has the effect of distending the hypnagogic state from a few minutes to a few hours. A bad sleeper spends his time going in and out of this whirlwind of images. It’s exhausting, but it’s also very rich: Kafka’s entire diary arises from this disorder. In 1912, he noted “no sleep, only my dreams“, a sentence that I didn’t understand before becoming an insomniac myself.
What is this strange book?
Alice is a survival manual in the land of adults; the adults all being represented by bizarre and dysfunctional characters. Alice is a child. Here she is confronted with a world where adults behave randomly and try to pass off their turpitude as the norm. Transposed to real life, we shudder at the idea of these adults who, in effect, normalize the worst. Incest. Or the patriarchy which is a demolition business for little girls. This book is an education – survival – manual drawn by Lewis Carroll for little girls. It gives them the rhetorical and logical weapons to not blindly obey the absurd injunctions of the adult world. This is why the idea of making him a rapist appears to me, instinctively, to be a contradiction in terms. See her, suddenly, at the table of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, rebelling against the label imposed on her; she persisted in this refusal, including in front of the Duchess, then in front of the Queen. Ultimately, in court, a factory for knocking heads one after another, his reaction will be to stand up straight and grow up. Triumphant through self-confidence in the face of this world of adults locked in a sort of crazy and uncontrolled childhood where only whim and arbitrariness reign. His only ally, ultimately, will be the Cheshire cat who agrees that “everyone is crazy”. And isn’t she herself a little crazy to follow them one after the other on their respective paths?
Anxiogenic paths that Tove Jansson’s drawings do not aim to clear up.
Tove Jansson portrays the cat in a disturbing manner. But he alone escapes the system – that of the Queen of Hearts – where everyone is condemned to beheading, except him, whose head is already separated from the body. The caterpillar is a small homunculus. It seemed important to me not to translate “the caterpillar” more “the caterpillar man” which seemed to me to preserve the language, certainly childish, but infinitely correct of Alice who does not let any character overcome her exquisite manners. Otherwise, perhaps, when the caterpillar man, in fact, stands up on his many legs to take advantage of his eight centimeters in height. For him, obviously, size matterswhich makes Alice giggle, visibly unimpressed by the virilistic assertiveness of her little interlocutor.
Pat Perna, screenwriter of the comic strip “Gregory”: “Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin touch our souls directly”
The patriarchy, of course, but, in Wonderland, it is the Queen who maintains a disturbing passion at the takeoff.
British tradition that brings together figures like Thatcher, Queens Victoria, Elizabeth (one or the other) and Anne, to name just a few. It is one of the rare peoples on earth who are part of a “sovereign” tradition. However, it is appropriate (the Queen of Hearts is the incarnation) to place them on the fringes of gender logic. They are also a representation of patriarchy. In my eyes, English queens are not women and it seems to me that in the eyes of the English, their queens are not exactly women.
Alice so helpless and yet so intelligent and skillful.
The real Alice must probably have been very intelligent to intrigue a mathematician as quirky as Carroll. The book can be read as a tribute to this child who – once placed in the text – continues to grow bolder as the trials fall upon her. His traveling companion, Mr. Rabbit, the figure of the zealous employee, does not have this same outlook. We would gladly force-feed him anxiolytics as he decomposes as his delay increases.
Author and translator, your daily life is made up of deadlines. Do you find yourself, like Mr. Rabbit, being “late, late”?
No. Firstly, because at POL, my publisher, I benefit from very comfortable working conditions. And, above all, as a paroxysmal anxiety sufferer, I refuse to be the architect of my own gallop by confronting myself with untenable deadlines. I am therefore lucky, unlike Mr. Rabbit, not to fear delay. Everyone has their own neuroses; mine lets me decide on the maieutics of a manuscript. I “know” when it’s over. Even if the cat’s lesson is universal: “here everyone is crazy“.
Alice in Wonderland. Cambourakis Editions. Author: Lewis Carroll, pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. New French translation by Marie Darrieussecq. Illustrations: Tove Jansson.
