Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

'Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), 'you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.'
'And what does IT live on?'
'Weak tea with cream in it.'
A new difficulty came into Alice's head. 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested.
'Then it would die, of course.'
'But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully.
'It always happens,' said the Gnat.

In 2009, I read Alice in Wonderland. It was in a double book with Through the Looking Glass, which I intended to read but never got around to. I did notice upon reading Alice that some of the most famous episodes from the Alice stories weren't in Alice in Wonderland, primarily the Jabberwocky and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

That's remedied in Through the Looking Glass, which is just as absurd but somehow more difficult than its predecessor. When Alice in Wonderland is preoccupied with playing cards and the contrast of size, Through the Looking Glass is structured around an elaborate chess problem, one I could barely even identify, let alone solve, and issues of time and place. Throughout the story, Alice tries to move from place to the next, usually ending up somewhere--or some time--completely different than she intended. Here she is, trying vainly to get an expanation from the Queen:

[T]he Queen cried 'Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. 'Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last.
'Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. 'Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!'

Every step Alice takes seems to land her in a new, bizarre situation, until the little girl who bravely endured giant caterpillars, the cheshire cat, and the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland is nearly overcome. I've heard that Through the Looking Glass is a darker work than Alice, and although the storyline doesn't seem darker to me (and has no single scene as disturbing as the pig-baby), it is more disorienting. Differences of size are comprehensible, but differences of time, of spatial distance, of movement, these are more direct, more personal, and more overwhelming.

Alice, of course, eventually figures out what to do, and returns to her own time and place, but not without some lingering doubts about the nature of reality. No doubt her thoughts echo some of Carroll's own: the twisted logic of Wonderland looks on the surface like that of a child, but upon closer inspection reveals depth that only comes with time and experience. Through the Looking Glass closes with this haunting tercet:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

In Carroll's work, life seems as nonsensical and unreal as Wonderland. Who's to say what is, and what is not? These books don't provide any answers, but they do raise some interesting questions.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Christopher wrote a nice review of this book, in which he placed the work within the larger historical context of children's literature. That is an interesting facet of the book. At the time when Wonderland was published, children's literature was instructive and largely religious in nature. So, Carroll's absolute absurdism was something out of the ordinary.

The comedian Jim Gaffigan does a bit about dreams, in which he points out how people are alway really keen to tell others about their dreams, but to anyone but the ones having them dreams are horribly boring. That's how I felt about Wonderland and Looking Glass. While each had their moments of creativity, I generally found them to be quite tedious. I am sure that within the pantheon of children's literature, these works are extremely important, that they marked a veritable sea change...I just didn't care for either.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

If I wanted to, I think I would be justified in calling Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass two books, but I'm so ahead that I think I'll have some mercy on you people and just call it one, since I read them together in a shared volume. Hell, I'm not even reviewing all the Shakespeare plays I'm reading this year--I'm just that nice of a guy.

Anyway, I'd never read either Alice book, but I pretty much got the gist from the movie, which sort of squashes both books together. The books are actually a little trippier than I imagined, since the whole thing is actually a sort of dreamscape (literally in Wonderland), the transitions between scenes and events are often vague. Numerous times Alice ends up somewhere without knowing how she got there, or babies change into pigs, shit like that. Much of it is very creepy, and I wonder exactly why more people don't find it more disturbing--I suspect it is because, like me, few people have actually read it. A woman in my class made the interesting observation that kids who have chaotic childhoods often seem to be disturbed by the novel's absurdism, while children with healthy childhoods do not.

In any case, Alice is a pretty colorful piece of absurdism. The wordplay is amazing, from the Jabberwocky to little puns like the Mock Turtle--from whom mock turtle soup is made. At its heart, the Alice books are a response to children's literature, which up to this point (mid-19th century) had been dominated by very didactic books about God and righteousness which presented clear morals and encouraged children to become better people through their reading. Alice is a rejection of all that, to the point where it is almost completely stripped of meaning, down to a celebration of absurdism and nonsense. It's not so much a book (or pair of books) about nothing as on nothing, that is, nothing is its chief concern. In that way, I think it very interestingly foreshadowed modernism a genre that didn't appear for another seventy years after this was written.