Charles Lutwidge (Lutwidge) Dodgson, a wonderful English children's writer, an excellent mathematician, logician, a brilliant photographer and an inexhaustible inventor. Born on January 27, 1832 in Dairsbury near Warrington, Cheshire, in the family of a priest. In the Dodgson family, men were, as a rule, either army officers or clergymen (one of his great-grandfathers, Charles, rose to the rank of bishop, his grandfather, again Charles, was an army captain, and his eldest son, also Charles, was the father of the writer ). Charles Lutwidge was the third child and eldest son in a family of four boys and seven girls.
Young Dodgson was educated until the age of twelve by his father, a brilliant mathematician who was destined for a remarkable academic career, but chose to become a rural pastor. Charles’s “reading lists,” compiled together with his father, have survived, telling us about the boy’s solid intellect. After the family moved in 1843 to the village of Croft-on-Tees, in the north of Yorkshire, the boy was assigned to Richmond Grammar School. From childhood, he entertained his family with magic tricks, puppet shows, and poems he wrote for homemade home newspapers (“Useful and Edifying Poetry,” 1845). A year and a half later, Charles entered Rugby School, where he studied for four years (from 1846 to 1850), showing outstanding abilities in mathematics and theology.
In May 1850, Charles Dodgson was enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University, and moved to Oxford in January of the following year. However, in Oxford, after only two days, he receives unfavorable news from home - his mother is dying of inflammation of the brain (possibly meningitis or a stroke).
Charles studied well. Having won the Boulter Scholarship competition in 1851 and received first-class honors in mathematics and second-class honors in classical languages and ancient literature in 1852, the young man was admitted to scientific work, and also received the right to lecture in christian church, which he subsequently used for 26 years. In 1854 he graduated with a bachelor's degree from Oxford, where subsequently, after receiving his master's degree (1857), he worked, including the position of professor of mathematics (1855-1881).
Dr. Dodgson lived in a small house with turrets and was one of the landmarks of Oxford. His appearance and manner of speech were remarkable: slight asymmetry of the face, poor hearing (he was deaf in one ear), and a strong stutter. Charles delivered his lectures in a clipped, flat, lifeless tone. He avoided making acquaintances and spent hours wandering around the neighborhood. He had several favorite activities to which he devoted everything free time. Dodgson worked very hard - he got up at dawn and sat down at his desk. In order not to interrupt his work, he ate almost nothing during the day. A glass of sherry, a few cookies - and back to the desk.
Lewis Carroll Even at a young age, Dodgson drew a lot, tried his pen in poetry, wrote stories, sending his works to various magazines. Between 1854 and 1856 His works, mostly humorous and satirical, have appeared in national publications (Comic Times, The Train, Whitby Gazette and Oxford Critic). In 1856, a short romantic poem, “Solitude,” appeared in The Train under the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll.”
He invented his pseudonym in the following way: he “translated” the name Charles Lutwidge into Latin (it turned out Carolus Ludovicus), and then returned the “truly English” appearance to the Latin version. Carroll signed all his literary (“frivolous”) experiments with a pseudonym, and put his real name only in the titles of mathematical works (“Notes on plane algebraic geometry,” 1860, “Information from the theory of determinants,” 1866). Among a number of Dodgson's mathematical works, the work “Euclid and His Modern Rivals” (the last author's edition - 1879) stands out.
In 1861, Carroll took holy orders and became a deacon of the Church of England; This event, as well as the statute of Oxford Christ Church College, according to which professors had no right to marry, forced Carroll to abandon his vague matrimonial plans. At Oxford he met Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church College, and eventually became a friend of the Liddell family. It was easiest for him to find a common language with the dean’s daughters - Alice, Lorina and Edith; In general, Carroll got along with children much faster and easier than with adults - this was the case with the children of George MacDonald and the offspring of Alfred Tennyson.
Young Charles Dodgson was approximately six feet tall, slender and handsome, with curly brown hair and blue eyes, but it is believed that due to his stuttering, he had difficulty communicating with adults, but with children he relaxed, became free and fast in his speech.
It was the acquaintance and friendship with the Liddell sisters that led to the birth of the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland” (1865), which instantly made Carroll famous. The first edition of Alice was illustrated by the artist John Tenniel, whose illustrations are considered classics today.
Lewis Carroll The incredible commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life, as Lewis Carroll became quite famous all over the world, his mailbox was flooded with letters from admirers, and he began to earn very significant sums of money. However, Dodgson never abandoned his modest life and church positions.
In 1867, Charles left England for the first and last time and made a very unusual trip to Russia for those times. Visits Calais, Brussels, Potsdam, Danzig, Koenigsberg along the way, spends a month in Russia, returns to England via Vilna, Warsaw, Ems, Paris. In Russia, Dodgson visits St. Petersburg and its environs, Moscow, Sergiev Posad, and a fair in Nizhny Novgorod.
The first fairy tale was followed by a second book, “Alice Through the Looking Glass” (1871), the gloomy content of which was reflected in the death of Carroll’s father (1868) and the many years of depression that followed.
What is remarkable about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which have become the most famous children's books? On the one hand, this is a fascinating story for children with descriptions of travel to fantasy worlds with whimsical heroes who have forever become idols of children - who doesn’t know the March Hare or the Red Queen, the Quasi Turtle or the Cheshire Cat, Humpty Dumpty? The combination of imagination and absurdity makes the author’s style inimitable, the author’s ingenious imagination and play on words brings us finds that play on common sayings and proverbs, surreal situations break the usual stereotypes. At the same time, famous physicists and mathematicians (including M. Gardner) were surprised to discover a lot of scientific paradoxes in children's books, and episodes of Alice's adventures were often discussed in scientific articles.
Five years later, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), a fantasy poem describing the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously misfit creatures and one beaver, was published and was Carroll's last widely known work. Interestingly, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was convinced that the poem was written about him.
Carroll's interests are multifaceted. The end of the 70s and 1880s are characterized by the fact that Carroll publishes collections of riddles and games (“Doublets”, 1879; “Logic Game”, 1886; “Mathematical Curiosities”, 1888-1893), writes poetry (the collection “Poems? Meaning?”, 1883). Carroll went down in literary history as the writer of “nonsense,” including rhymes for children in which their name was “baked” and acrostics.
In addition to mathematics and literature, Carroll devoted a lot of time to photography. Although he was an amateur photographer, a number of his photographs were included, so to speak, in the annals of world photographic chronicles: these are photographs of Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry and many others. Carroll was especially good at taking pictures of children. However, in the early 80s, he abandoned photography, declaring that he was “tired” of this hobby. Carroll is considered one of the most famous photographers of the second half of the 19th century.
Carroll continued to write - on December 12, 1889, the first part of the novel “Sylvie and Bruno” was published, and at the end of 1893 the second, but literary critics reacted lukewarmly to the work.
Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, Surry County, on January 14, 1898, at the home of his seven sisters, from pneumonia that broke out after influenza. He was less than sixty-six years old. In January 1898, most of Carroll's handwritten legacy was burned by his brothers Wilfred and Skeffington, who did not know what to do with the piles of papers that their “learned brother” left behind in the rooms at Christ Church College. In that fire, not only manuscripts disappeared, but also some of the negatives, drawings, manuscripts, pages of a multi-volume diary, bags of letters written to the strange Doctor Dodgson by friends, acquaintances, ordinary people, children. The turn came to the library of three thousand books (literally fantastic literature) - the books were sold at auction and distributed to private libraries, but the catalog of that library was preserved.
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was included in the list of twelve "most English" objects and phenomena compiled by the UK Ministry of Culture, Sport and Media. Films and cartoons are made based on this cult work, games and musical performances are held. The book has been translated into dozens of languages (more than 130) and has had a great influence on many authors.
Carroll Lewis (real name Charles Latwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898), English writer and mathematician.
Born on January 27, 1832 in the village of Daresbury (Cheshire) into a large family of a rural priest. Even as a child, Charles was interested in literature; he set up his own puppet theater and composed plays for it.
The future writer wanted to become a priest, like his father, so he entered Oxford University to study theology, but there he became interested in mathematics. He then taught mathematics at Oxford's Christchurch College for a quarter of a century (1855-1881).
On July 4, 1862, young Professor Dodgson went for a walk with the family of his Liddell acquaintances. During this walk, he told Alice Liddell and her two sisters a fairy tale about Alice's adventures. Charles was persuaded to write down the story he had invented. In 1865, Alice in Wonderland was published as a separate book. However, Dodgson, who by that time had already been ordained as a priest, could not sign it with his name. He took the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The author himself considered “Alice” a fairy tale for adults and only in 1890 did he release its children’s version. After the release of the first edition of the fairy tale, many letters came from readers asking to continue the fascinating story. Carroll wrote Through the Looking-Glass (published 1871). Exploring the world through play, proposed by the writer, has become a common technique in children's literature.
The Alice books are not Carroll's only works.
In 1867, he left England for the only time in his life, going to Russia with his friend. Carroll described his impressions in the Russian Diary.
He also wrote poems for children and the book “Silvia and Bruno”.
The writer himself called his works nonsense (nonsense) and did not attach any significance to them. He considered the main work of his life to be a serious mathematical work dedicated to the ancient Greek scientist Euclid.
Modern experts believe that Dodgson made his main scientific contribution with his works on mathematical logic. And children and adults enjoy reading his fairy tales.
The writer died on January 14, 1898 in Guildford
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Lewis Carroll. Fairy tales for children.
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Structural study literary work may be based on other criteria: the international index of fairy tale plots by the Finnish scientist Anti Arne is based on plots; V. Ya. Propp identified in a folk tale a sequence of small units that are constant for all fairy tales and which he called functions. However, Aarne, Propp, and many other researchers studied folk tales. It is in this area that the greatest results have been achieved, since repeating elements common to different fairy tales are most clearly visible in folk tales.
A literary fairy tale differs significantly from a folk tale; it is more difficult to identify permanent elements of structure here, although such attempts have also been made. Probably, for a literary fairy tale, the motive is the unit on which it is most correct to build a study.
American literary scholars William Anderson and Patrick Groff write about motifs in children's literature. In their interpretation, motives are recurring images, characters, themes, situations and structures. A similar definition of motive is offered by the Swedish researcher Goethe Klingberg: “A motive is a pattern of action or a situation, as opposed to material, which is the specific content of a literary work.” Thus, the motive is a certain invariant, an abstract literary model, which in each specific work can take on a different form depending on the material, theme, purpose of the author and other conditions.
Since there are elements of the real in any work of fiction - the only question is how they are combined with elements of the fairy tale, we will call a literary fairy tale a work that depicts events, characters or situations that, with the help of certain techniques, go beyond the boundaries of the observable world into the magical one. fairy world.
The world, as D. Tolkien, the famous English storyteller and philologist, calls it. These techniques will be the magical motives. A number of works on children's literature list magical motifs, their number and composition are varied, sometimes they are not called motifs, but are presented as a type of book, for example, books about living dolls.
But attempts to classify magical motifs in literary fairy tales have never been made. The criterion for such a classification can be the ratio of the real and the fabulous in the work. Moving from more fabulous to less fabulous, let's consider the main motives and their variations. Each subsequent group of motifs represents a new stage, a new scheme of the relationship between the magical and the non-magical. At the same time, a realistic story will be like a limit to which a fairy tale strives, but will never reach it.
The opposite pole is the folk tale and literary fairy tale, written according to the canons of the folk tale, using its traditional characters, situations and motives. Such are the fairy tales of Pushkin, the fairy tales of Andersen, some of the tales of the Englishwoman Eleanor Farjeon, the Swede Elsa Beskow. We are interested in motives that differ from traditional ones.
The purpose of this work is to reveal the uniqueness of magical motifs in L. Carroll’s literary fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland.”
The work proposes to solve the following problems:
Give general concept motive.
Classify magical motifs in fairy tales.
Determine the role and significance of motives for the compositional construction of a fairy tale.
II. Magic motives.
1. AN EXTRAORDINARY COUNTRY.
Unlike the traditional fairy-tale Thirtieth State, where kings and princesses, dragons and brave young men live, a completely special world appears in the fairy tale: “. it was a low, long dungeon; its vaults were faintly illuminated by rows of hanging lamps. True, there were doors along the entire length of the walls, but, unfortunately, they were all locked. Alice quickly made sure of this by walking around the entire dungeon twice and trying each door several times. She walked dejectedly back and forth, trying to figure out how to get out of here. Alice really wanted to get out of this dark dungeon and into freedom.”
Extraordinary inhabitants live in this world: Dodo, Dodo, Cheshire Cat, and whoever else was there. This world is closed; it has no connection with the world of reality. Based on what has been said, we can conclude that the fairy-tale country of the Dungeon is a country of talking animals: “Well, how are you doing?” asked the Cheshire Cat, as soon as his mouth appeared enough to speak.
“I don’t like it at all,” said Alice. - She's so terrible. "
2. THE HERO FINDS INTO AN EXTRAORDINARY COUNTRY.
Alice finds herself in an extraordinary country - the Dungeon, living with her mother and father in an ordinary house in an ordinary city. But we are interested in one magical motive: Alice finds herself in an unreal world. And in this country good and evil heroes live, animals talk, and in general all sorts of miracles happen.
The method of getting into Fairytale Land is an important component of the main motive and has a lot of options:
Accidental entry into Fairytale Land: Alice fell into a well and found herself in the Dungeon: “The hole at first went smoothly, like a tunnel, and then immediately ended so abruptly and unexpectedly that Alice did not have time to gasp before she flew - flew down, into some very deep well." How can she get through one of the doors? She succeeds with the help of a bottle of medicine on which it is written: “DRINK ME!” She herself did not notice how the bottle was empty.
Oh, what is this happening to me! - said Alice. - I probably really do fold up like a spyglass!
It was difficult to argue with this: by this time there was only a quarter of a meter left in it.”
To find out in more detail what is happening in the Dungeon, Alice decides to get into Fairytale Land through the symbolic door: the rabbit hole: “And in front of her there was already a pretty little house, on the door of which there was a copper plate polished to a shine with the owner’s name engraved
B. RABBIT
Alice entered the house without knocking and ran upstairs to the front rooms.”
At the end of the fairy tale, it turns out that Alice dreamed of wonderful adventures:
Wake up, wake up, dear, said the sister. - You’re very sleepy!
Oh, what a funny dream I had! - said Alice.
And she began to tell her sister everything she could remember about her strange adventures.
For Lewis Carroll, sleep turns out to be a very convenient way to resolve a complex and confusing conflict: at a crucial moment the heroine wakes up.
3. TRANSFORMATIONS.
The motif of transformation is one of the most ancient in literature; it is widespread in mythology and folklore. We will be interested in such transformations that occur in Fairytale Land, that is, in the Dungeon. The motive for transformation can be viewed from several angles. Let's start with the nature of the transformation. The most common type of growth change. Alice, having become tiny, gets acquainted with the world of insects, she becomes small - very small, while drinking a diminutive liquid, and then becomes big again at the most inopportune moment. The second important factor is the reason for the transformation.
The third factor is the source or method of transformation.
Sometimes transformation occurs at the will of a sorcerer, wizard, or witch.
But in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland,” transformations occur at the behest of Alice: “And then Alice was surprised to notice that the pebbles on the floor had all turned into cookies, and a brilliant idea struck her. “If I eat just one thing,” she thought, “I’ll probably either grow up right away, or vice versa. I'll try!" She tried it first and then simply swallowed the cookie. And I was delighted especially when I noticed that I immediately began to shrink!”
4. A HERO IS AN EXTRAORDINARY BEING.
Fairytale Land can be inhabited by a wide variety of creatures: talking animals, witches, and new creatures invented by the author. But if these extraordinary creatures live in a real environment, this is a special motive. It is extremely common in modern children's literature and has many variations:
1. In the book by Lewis Carroll, Animals live in the Underground and eat like people: they drink tea, eat cookies with jam, cakes, marmalade. “Near the house, under a tree, a table was set for tea; The Hat and the Hare were drinking tea, and between them sat on a chair the Garden Dormouse, a pretty little animal like a squirrel.”
Or: “Would you like some cake?” - the Hare kindly suggested.
What kind of cake? “I don’t see him,” said Alice.”
All the characters talk and make friends with people: the Cheshire Cat explains to Alice what is happening here, and in general he is her best friend.
2. Living cards: Queens of Spades and Queens of Hearts, Kings, Jacks, courtiers, janitors, gardeners playing croquet: “Indeed, the playground was full of bumps and potholes, hummocks and holes, instead of balls there were live hedgehogs, instead of hammers there were live flamingos, and the soldiers, standing on all fours and bending in an arc, performed the duties of a croquet gate,” they argue: “It seems that the Executioner argued that you cannot cut off a head if there is no body. The king argued that as long as there was a head, you could cut it off, and there was no need to talk nonsense! And the Queen claimed that if everything was not done this very second and even much earlier, she would order everyone’s heads to be cut off without exception,” sitting in court: “The King and Queen were already sitting on the throne, and a huge crowd had gathered around: birds, animals of all kinds and breeds, not to mention cards of all stripes. In front of the judge's throne stood in chains, guarded by two soldiers - one on the right, the other on the left - the Knave of Hearts.
Little people. They are living cards.
5. THE HERO IS ENDOWED WITH AN UNUSUAL PROPERTIES.
An even smaller way into the fairy-tale world is the motive of the hero, who differs from ordinary people in only one, even if completely supernatural, quality. Alice miraculously flies in from another world, she talks with animals: the Cheshire Cat, the mouse, the Drond. Of particular note is the ability to talk with animals.
Becoming tiny, Alice gains the ability to understand the language of animals, and when she turns big again, she loses it.
6. Imaginary FRIENDS.
The motive of the imaginary friend is interesting. This animal friend exists only in the heroine’s imagination, but still Alice talks to him:
Well, how are you doing? - said the Cheshire Cat.
“In my opinion, they are playing incorrectly,” Alice began in a plaintive voice.
For Alice, the cat is real and represents an element of the fairy tale world. The Cheshire Cat is Alice's guide to Wonderland, provides her with information about this country, introduces her to the inhabitants, and warns her about the dangers that await the heroine.
III. Conclusion.
Each literary fairy tale can use one or more magical motifs, and in addition, as already mentioned, magical motifs are combined with other motifs.
From all that has been said, it follows that magical motifs play an important role in revealing the special world and extraordinary inhabitants inhabiting a fairy-tale land.
In Lewis Carroll's literary fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland,” 6 magical motifs were considered:
An extraordinary country.
The hero finds himself in an extraordinary country.
Transformations.
A hero is an extraordinary being.
The hero is endowed with an extraordinary property.
Imaginary friends.
Of course, the considered motives do not pretend to be exhaustive. And yet, it seems that such a classification gives a sufficient idea of the magical motifs found in literary fairy tales.
Children's English literature gave many works necessary for preschoolers and primary schoolchildren to study in literature classes. “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” by L. Carroll, “Winnie the Pooh and everything, everything, everything...” by A.A. Milne, limericks and “Meaningless ABCs” by E. Lear, “The Hobbit” by D.D. R. Tolkien, “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C. Lewis, the fairy tales of R. Kipling and O. Wilde serve as an inexhaustible source of not only aesthetic impressions for the child, but also material for creating speech therapy exercises.
The philosophical basis of English nonsense literature is absurdity, “nonsense”, “reversal”. In a certain sense, nonsense is the inversion of the meaningful. The ordinary world is turned upside down and turned inside out, it turns into a world where everything happens as you please, but not as it should. English storytellers often use the humor of logical contradiction.
Communication with a child should be fruitful for both the child and the adult, then it will bring satisfaction and joy. Meanwhile, the children's world is not similar to the world of adults, and one must patiently look for points of contact between these two, so different, worlds. The easiest way to find such common ground is in the game, because, as E. Bern noted, all people, small and large, “play games.” What is the main mechanism games? Probably in suspension. Familiar objects in the game are endowed with characteristics that are not characteristic of them. In a children's game, inanimate dolls come to life, the room turns into a fairy-tale kingdom, and the participants in the game themselves, the children, become the creators of a fantasy world they have imagined.
The most sophisticated type of game is a verbal, literary game. When immersed in the artistic world, the reader escapes reality, which is why children and adults alike do not like being torn away from their favorite books. Each book contains a game, the rules of which you comprehend only when you penetrate deeper and deeper into the very space of the literary text. This idea can be illustrated by the example of the fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland,” written by the famous English writer and scientist Lewis Carroll . "Alice in Wonderland" is a unique game that is interesting for both children and adults. “Alice...” begins with the fact that the author demands that readers step back from the concepts of space, speed, volume, and size that are familiar to reality. The fairy tale immediately sets its own fantastic system of measures and volumes. (Remember that Carroll was a mathematician, and it is so important for a mathematician to remember the conventions of any unit.) Games with unreal volumes and spaces begin on the first page, when Alice falls underground and falls. Alice's fantastic fall does not look like a fall, but like a flight that lasts so long that she manages to see everything that surrounds her. Then another volume shift follows: Alice drinks liquid from bottles and becomes very small. Long before Carroll, J. Swift had already tried, albeit in a different way, to reduce and enlarge the man in “Gulliver,” but Carroll did not stop at the game of decreasing-increasing, slowing-down, speeding up. Carroll begins to confuse causes with effects, to combine incompatible things. The liquid Alice drank was “very tasty”, combining the tastes of cake, ice cream, turkey and bread and butter. All of the dishes mentioned are wonderful, but it is almost impossible to imagine their taste at the same time, and even if possible, it is unlikely to be at least a little pleasant. Or another example: in one of the chapters the characters argue which statement is false: “I see what I eat” or “I eat what I see.” Both statements are made up of the same words, but they have completely different meanings, and the meaning of one cannot be preferred to the meaning of the other. However, Carroll invites Alice and readers to make comparisons. The further the fairy tale moves, the “weirder” it becomes, in Alice’s words. Inside the big fairy tale, small completed works appear: poems, sayings... Small insert works were composed by Carroll in the tradition of English nonsense poetry, marked by the name of Edward Lear. The poems in Alice, like Lear's, are full of surprises, which creates a sense of cheerful nonsense.
There are several translations of “Alice...”, one of them, “Anya in Wonderland,” belongs to V. Nabokov. When translating poems from “Alice...”, Nabokov added some additional details for the Russian reader. Every Russian child knows “Borodino”, “How the Prophetic Oleg gets ready now...”, “Chizhik-Pyzhik”; Nabokov wrote parodies of these famous poems and inserted them into his translation, so to the riddles on Carroll’s logic and mathematics, riddles on Nabokov’s Russian literature were added.
At first, children and adults think that Carroll’s “Alice...” is a collection of absurdity and nonsense, but, in fact, the fairy tale is a game, the rules of which are formulated for the attentive reader inside the text. After playing this game, young and adult readers change their ideas about the absoluteness of spatial boundaries that are accepted in everyday life, and the logic of language, so understandable, turns out to be mysterious. The reality we find ourselves in is very complex. On the one hand, it is dominated by the same type of rules, consequences and causes, laws of similarity, but, on the other hand, reality is so diverse that it requires extraordinary solutions that violate all the usual laws. And extraordinary solutions can only be obtained in a game, for example, the one invented by the English storyteller Lewis Carroll.
In contrast to the regularity and harmony of life, Nonsense seeks and highlights the absurdity and incongruity of everything that happens to us and outside of us. While Meaning remains and is forced to remain pathetic prose and common place, Nonsense is not just prosaic, but an ordinary denial of Meaning, does not simply caricature absurdities and inconsistencies, but reveals a new and deeper harmony of life precisely through its contradictions.
Here are the four laws of Nonsense, highlighted by E.V. Klyuev:
1. The text is what it is, namely, only and exclusively a text, indifferent to what its interpreters “fill” it with.
2. The text is a phenomenon designed only and exclusively for reading: its “adequate understanding” (as the reduction of meaning to a set of formulations) is impossible.
3. The text has no obligations: neither to the author, nor to the reader, nor to itself.
Thus, we can identify a paradigm of relations to a literary text as such. The essential point of this paradigm is, therefore, irrationality and uniqueness of the creative act. This is confirmed again and again by the direct statements of the classics of absurd literature. Thus, L. Carroll argued about “Alice”: "Every word in the dialogues came on its own". Literary nonsense be that as it may, there is a game by the rules.
As for the rules of the game, which are maintained by literary nonsense, these rules are quite amenable to registration and description. Undoubtedly, G.K. Chesterton is right when he states: "... in in the most special sense in its(Carroll's) nonsense is nothing but nonsense. There is no point in his nonsense; in this it differs from the more humane nonsense of Rabelais or the more bitter- Swift. Carroll was just playing a Logic Game; his great achievement was that this game was new and meaningless, and also one of the best V world" or - “It was nonsense for nonsense’s sake.”
Walter De la Mare argued: “Carroll’s nonsense in itself may be one of those works that “cannot be understood,” but there is no need to understand them. It is self-evident; and, moreover, may disappear completely if we try to do so.” After all, nonsense is a system of all possible contradictions, proposed as such by the “producer of nonsense.”
Charles Carpenter's study "The Structure of the English Language", which, in particular, formulated the conclusion that the structure itself poems Jabberwocky" in "Alice Through the Looking Glass" is a carrier of meaning." Elizabeth Sewell believed: “In the game of nonsense... the human mind realizes two equally inherent tendencies- the tendency to disorder and the tendency to order reality. It is in the confrontation between these two mutually exclusive tendencies that the “game of nonsense” takes shape.”
Literature of the Absurd structures a certain world, using for this purpose traditional designs if possible. Poems are actually introduced into the structure of both texts by chance and perform primarily or even exclusively formal task, that is, - again! - emphasize the organization of the structure of the absurd text.
Carroll scholars are inclined to believe that almost all of Carroll’s memorable poems from the two “Alices” owe their origin to the work of other poets, Galinskaya highlights. At the same time, along with parodies of famous and to this day poetic works, among the fourteen poems considered parodies from both fairy tales, there are also parodies of verses of little-known, or even completely forgotten, authors, not to mention paraphrases of those insignificant crafts that, one might say they are parodying themselves. In some cases, Carroll used the entire text of the original, in others - only the plot, in others - exclusively the size of the original poem, and sometimes a single line of the original was taken as the basis for the parody.
It should be said here that the opinion that the poems in the two “Alices” are parodies was unconditionally accepted in Carroll scholarship only for several decades after their publication. IN last years Other points of view also appeared. For example, the American researcher Beverly L. Clark believes that the question of whether the poems in the two “Alices” are parodies relates primarily to the “problem of definition,” i.e. to what we have agreed to understand by the term “parody”). According to the researcher, this term has a narrower definition than is customary in Carroll studies. B. L. Clarke is inclined to believe that the only thing that can be called a parody is satirical work, which deliberately and openly makes fun of the original. As for Carroll, she writes, the writer did not simply put absurd meaning into the form of the original original, he often had in mind not only literary satire, but also a general moral critical approach and view.
Speaking about gaming literature, Ananyina notes that gaming, in fact, are such attitudes common to all works of art as separating the content of a literary text from the discourses of real life; the resulting shift in context and reorganization of connections that surrounded the object of the narrative in reality, at the level of the literary text; an increasing degree of reflection of the narrative, which is recognized as secondary in relation to reality due to the attitudes towards representation (and/or imitation) operating in it, despite the paradox of authenticity - the conditional endowment of the fictional world with the rights of autonomy in a number of literary forms, the playful principle is manifested more strongly than in others.
The boundary of the transition to a gaming atmosphere can be considered the degree of reflection of the text, the focus on revealing its secondary, “made” nature, as well as the presence in it of keys to deciphering the principles and mechanisms of its creation. As a result, the emphasis is on the opposition “real - fictional”, on how these opposites relate and interact with each other in the text and how the transition from one world to another affects the reader’s thinking when perceiving the text.
Space and time, which create their own architectonics of the game text, are felt differently than usual, contrasting with reality to the point of discomfort. Game poetics also presupposes a clear organization of narrative characters who perform the game part at the will of the author - the game scriptwriter. The principle of unreliable narration, adjacent to the general mood of ambivalence, activates the reader’s attention, depriving him of confidence in the sincerity and omniscience of the author and the reliability of his conveyance of the thoughts and actions of the characters.
The game text, like the game itself, “creates order”, therefore, even despite the first impression of possible chaos and inconsistency of the narrative (as, for example, in the novels of A. Bitov or X. Cortazar), the game text represents a system thought out by the author, the decoding of which is the responsibility of the reader.
First of all, a specific attitude of the reader to the text, his special perception is assumed; To achieve this, the author uses a diverse arsenal of techniques and techniques, which can be divided into two broad categories:
Manipulations with words, ranging from an unusual choice of words to an open linguistic experiment in the form of a language game (“Puns and diverse playful manipulations with words within the text give the text a special aesthetic dimension and emphasize its playful nature”).
A special arrangement in the text of examples of language play, including various techniques - for example, allusions and quotation, “structural (motivational) use of words... permeating the entire text and creating a formal “pattern” within it,” etc.
Thus, the two most important aspects of game stylistics - the creation of unusual linguistic material and its non-standard (non-linear) organization in the text - develop into a special style, which not only evokes a special mood in the reader, but also serves as a way of conveying additional information in the sphere of interaction between game strategies of characters - author - reader.
Analysis of the features of the playing style of a particular text is based on the same stages of research as the general style of literary speech:
1. Determination of the general linguistic structure of the work;
2. Consideration of specific ways of transforming linguistic material;
3. Determination of typical linguistic structures and stylistic devices characteristic of a given text.
In a game text, the informative, communicating function of language is in a subordinate position in relation to the external, stylistic side of speech, up to extreme cases when the language game becomes an end in itself. Language composition game texts demonstrate a careful selection of material, as well as the existence of certain laws of compatibility that influence the arrangement of stylistic means and their interaction within the text.
It has become traditional to divide the analysis of a language game into two aspects - from the point of view of what is played out (for example, semantic categories of animation, grammatical categories of number, aspect, etc.), and how it is played out. Last method, starting with Freud's classification of pun mechanisms, is described in terms close in meaning to the logical operators of disjunction and conjunction. Condensation and ambiguity - terms introduced by Freud - in modern literary criticism designate the two poles of the action of the language game. S. Stewart, speaking about puns and wallet words, defines these phenomena as follows: “Discourse of this type ramifies at every step. A pun implies two or more meanings simultaneously present in one word...” and “A pun implies two or more words simultaneously present in one meaning.”
The behavior of linguistic signs that enter into such relations of simultaneity and mutual exclusivity is anomalous for language. A text, striving to reveal its artificial nature, thus tries to place its elements in similar extra-systemic relationships in which their boundaries would be blurred and open. Tactically, this task is accomplished by disturbing the balance between the form and content of the sign, and this violation must clearly exceed the norms allowed by the language.
Attention to form forces us to reconsider the external boundaries of the word as a whole and the internal boundaries of its components. Language play as part of the play style also exists within the two indicated ways of playing out language material. In addition to the general desire to emphasize the arbitrariness of the connection between form and content, which is usual for language, the gaming style reveals the following typical characteristics language game:
1) The language game becomes an integral element of the text, in which puns and a series of puns (in in this case the pun is understood as typical example language game) acts as one of the supporting components of the narrative. “The play on words does not go unnoticed, as usually happens in everyday speech. On the contrary, the task of storytelling is to move from pun to pun, like an eye that moves from object to object, ignoring the distance between them that defines their boundaries.
2) Language play in a game text is not always an attack against existing language norms or a gross violation of them; on the contrary, there is a noticeable tendency to logically develop existing rules, to use the space reserved for the potential development of the language. Moreover, often the game works themselves provide explanations for the language game found in them, actively using analogy and comparison with existing linguistic phenomena.
3) The lack of order at one level (phonetic arbitrariness, semantic ambiguity, grammatical confusion) is necessarily compensated by the clear manifestation of ordinary linguistic patterns at other levels. The best example of this is the clear grammatical structure of Jabberwocky, which ensures its understanding even in the face of semantic ambiguity.
The last two properties of the gaming style determine another distinctive feature of it - the focus on the potential possibility of deciphering a language experiment. There is a certain “promise” of the possibility of obtaining the final meaning of the game statement. It is assumed that the reader/character, who has the appropriate knowledge or has received explanations, can unravel the game text by deriving a rule common to a given group of linguistic techniques.
From this point of view, examples of a language game represent, as it were, the plot of an action in miniature, where there is an exposition (presentation of the material of the language game), development of the action (assessment of the relationship of the language game to the surrounding context) and a finale/denouement, where the reader determines the meaning of the game and his own attitude towards her. The value of the language game, its stylistic coloring, lies in the combination of unexpected and elegant moves that the reader must take to achieve the ending.
Meanwhile, the game text brings the language game to the level of an independent game technique, designed to draw the reader’s attention to the pun mechanism itself, the process of creating those “abnormal” deviations from successful communication, such as homonymous, polysemic, phraseological meanings that inevitably arise in the language and testify to his “life”. The abundance of neologisms and occasional constructions at all levels of language, usual for language games, reflects the peculiarities of the creation of language and its subsequent life in specific speech forms.
A stable literary trend that has developed in the works of E. Lear, L. Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, and later many writers of the 20th century (such as D. Joyce or V. Nabokov), addresses the same problem that has worried philosophers since antiquity: what is language - a means or a goal, a man-made method of expressing his thoughts or the system that forms these thoughts? The similarity of the mechanisms of some puns in Carroll's texts with language games in folklore takes on an additional aspect: folklore humorous poems, false etymology, and especially children's lyrics raise the problem of the mechanics of language, which is taken for granted by people. Even the most, at first glance, radical language experiments of literary nonsense analyzed by Sewell do not add any new elements to the language system, but only discover new ways of combining them - a feature that unites them with codes and ciphers.
The game at the lexical-semantic level is based in Carroll's texts on several mechanisms. First of all, this is a violation of the imagery of a word, its inherent valency through the creation of unusual phrases and phrases. Violation of the semantic coherence of a statement through tautology and literal reading of metaphors is also actively used. And finally, creating a contrast between the literal and figurative interpretation of figurative statements to create a “pseudo-semantic” connection between episodes (metaphorical and metonymic foundations of the composition) turns out to be a powerful gaming technique.
Unusual, somewhat shocking and grotesque phrases are often found in L. Carroll's texts. Alice repeating from memory the poems of I. Watts in Chapter II of “Wonderland” , fully feels this effect of a frightening grotesque, enhanced by the fact that the anomalous combination of nouns, adjectives and adverbs occurs against her will:
L. Carroll's texts repeatedly use this technique, thanks to which the logical chain of cause and effect is interrupted and, instead of sequential movement from one object to another, from action to action, it closes on itself. Indicative in this regard is a detailed example of a tautological periphrasis from the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:
The lexical-semantic paradox in this passage is partly based on the level of syntax, replacing the usual construction of comparison “X as Y” with the tautological “X as X”. “Closedness” and cyclicity also deforms the cause-and-effect connective “X, because V” into “X, because X.” The semantic “dead end” formed as a result of such a coincidence of cause and effect, two objects of comparison, creates an information “vacuum” in which the reader does not find the keys for further movement through the text.
He turns to folk songs, also subjecting them to rethinking, but the nature of this rethinking is qualitatively different. The text of both tales contains many direct folklore song borrowings. They are concentrated mainly in "Through the Looking Glass": folk songs about Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, Tweedledum and Tweedledum. However, the final chapters of "Wonderland" - the trial of the Knave - are based on an old folk rhyme.
Although the reader's perception of Carroll in the 20th century was under the sign of psychoanalysis, the greatest achievement of Carroll studies during this period can be considered the interpretation of the writer's work from the point of view of the philosophy of language. The development of linguistics has made it possible to take a fresh look at those elements of Carroll’s texts that were previously perceived as nothing more than a means of conveying the author’s satirical attitude. Puns and occasionalisms have become the subject of not only linguistic and stylistic research, but also study from the point of view of logic, philosophy, and semiotics. It also turned out to be productive to compare examples of Carroll’s language game with similar phenomena in the texts of other authors (J. Joyce, V. Nabokov), which clarifies a lot regarding the specific functions of this stylistic phenomenon in a separate text and reveals the literary continuity between the discoveries of the author of “Alice” and the works of writers of later periods.
Carroll's unusual linguistic experiments that went beyond local puns largely determined his popularity in the second half of the 20th century. Both parts of the dilogy are focused primarily on one problem: how reliable language is, how accurate and reliable verbal communication can be, and to what extent an individual’s security and self-confidence depend on the order in linguistics.
Answers to such a question are not limited only to the sphere of language. The mixture of a symbol and a real object, literal and figurative meanings, a verbal sign and the object designated by it has far-reaching metaphysical significance. Among the variety of techniques that Carroll uses to create a grotesque atmosphere, where any norm is brought to the point of absurdity and loses its power, violation of the system of linguistic norms turns out to be the most effective. The specific implementation of this technique in both parts of the dilogy is contained in numerous puns based on semantic uncertainty, polysemy of words or expressions, play on homonymous consonances and decomposition of phraseological units.
The treatment of language that Carroll offers in his tales was innovative for the 19th century. One of the first, perhaps due to his fascination with mathematics and logic, is to address how “naming” occurs in language, whereby words mean what they mean. The problem of meaning, meaning, which does not lose its relevance for the writer throughout his life, is found in almost every work of his, but receives its most typical embodiment in “Through the Looking Glass”: Humpty Dumpty, the mythical “interpreter” of any text, turned into Lately into a symbol of hermeneutics and philology with its self-confident attempts to reveal the deep laws of language.
In the work of N.M. Demurova, relying on E. Sewell’s book, pays great attention to the study of the game material itself, or, as Sewell calls it, discrete “chips”, the manipulation of which constitutes, in fact, the content of the dilogy. Much of this material belongs to language; The language game, puns and parodies that fill L. Carroll’s texts allow us to trace the principle of the game that organizes them at the level of individual words and entire structures. In this regard, the study focuses on analyzing the significance of Carroll's pre-established game patterns for play, such as imitation of games popular in Victorian England (croquet, various riddles, etc.). Changes that general principle undergoes one or another game in a fairy tale, allow us to draw an analogy with poetic parodies: in both cases, according to Demurova, we are talking about “substitutions” within the framework of one or another model, the recreation of one or another layout, the structural elements of which are preserved and filled with new content . The author relies on the concept of Yu.N. Tynyanov, who separates parody and parody. This allows us to speak of a “non-parodic parody” that uses the parodic skeleton of the original work; the process of creating a parody corresponds to the playful reorganization of the material (“the dismantling of the work itself as a system,” according to Tynyanov). “Carroll’s parodies... are structures, the individual components of which are subject to the most unexpected and arbitrary changes at the whim of the author... We clearly feel both ordered (the original sample) and disordered forms (the parody itself), merged into a single structure of images.” .
When considering Carroll's texts and creativity as a game, presented in the mentioned studies, however, only one aspect of the game principle is emphasized. We are talking mainly about logic, in this case about the logic of the game, and not about the poetics of an artistic text, which appears as the result of some mechanical manipulations. The playful principle in Carroll’s texts is also not limited to modeling the plot by analogy with one or another real game, which is rather a special case, but not the main manifestation of the poetics of the game. Elements of the narrative, such as the system of characters, their interaction, goals and ways to achieve them, and means of constructing game worlds, were not always considered in listed works as a category of a work of art.
Turning to the entire richness of the language game in Alice, we can distinguish several levels of linguistic material used by the writer. The following levels are distinguished at which the language game is played:
Phonetics and phonotactics (cases of intentional alliteration and assonance, euphonic/dysphonic construction of neologisms and other cases of playing with the phonetic side of a word; playing with spelling rules in the form of “phonetic writing”, etc.);
Morphology and word formation (primarily such techniques for constructing neologisms as prefixation/affixation; contamination; shifting semantic accents within a word, etc.);
Vocabulary and semantics (violation of lexical compatibility; decomposition of phrasemes and literal reading of figurative expressions; compositional use of metaphors, etc.);
Printing and graphics (graphic means of accentuation of language games; methods of organizing written text, etc.).
Individual examples of playing each of these levels of language, described below, will illustrate not only the rules that Carroll was guided by in a given case, but also how specific cases of a language game develop into a kind of unity, where the entire hierarchy of language works to create a unique style of play text.
The assessment of the ballad “Jabberwocky” is put into Alice’s mouth at the very beginning of “Through the Looking Glass”: “Very nice poems,” said Alice thoughtfully, “but it’s not so easy to understand them. (You know, she didn’t even want to admit to herself that she didn’t understand anything). “They lead to all sorts of thoughts - although I don’t know what... One thing is clear: someone killed someone here... But, by the way, maybe not...” The ballad “Jabberwocky” was translated into Russian Five times. Topping the list is the translation by T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik, published in 1924. The ballad was called “Verlioka”. T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik, as the famous Russian linguist M.V. Panov believes, created neologisms that were transparent in structure, funny, invented with taste and, unlike Carroll’s, had a very clear morphemic structure. In 1940, the ballad was translated by V. and L. Uspensky, giving it the name “The Ballad of Jabberwock,” which only to some extent corresponds to the English original. Most of the words in the translation of V. and L. Uspensky, published in 1940 by the magazine "Koster", according to M.V. Panov, have "clouded articulation", the translators' neologisms turned out to be somehow strange, devoid of Carroll's humor. In the English text, continues M.V. Panov, “the words are strange, eccentric, amazing, paradoxical, but they are still clearly cute.” In the translation by V. and L. Uspensky, the result was “octopus words” that frighten the reader, although some of them are quite expressive: “mop, chryli, thunderous.” But even these expressive words are scary. In 1967, the Bulgarian publishing house of literature in foreign languages published a translation of two fairy tales about the adventures of Alice, carried out by N.M. Demurova. The ballad "Jabberwocky" was translated for this edition by D.G. Orlovskaya, giving the poem the name "Jabberwocky". Here, as we see, the translator D.G. Orlovskaya “lost” the bird Dzhubdzub in the second stanza of the ballad, which, in all likelihood, did not fit into the size. M.V. Panov especially notes the translation by D.G. Orlovskaya as the most successful. In his opinion, the translator managed to combine the advantages that were separated in the first two translations: “Orlovskaya’s words are fish! Good, dexterous, agile, flexible, cheerful.” In 1969, translator A.A. Shcherbakov gave the ballad “Jabberwocky” the name “Tarbormoshki”, and called its protagonist Tarbormot. Finally, in 1980, the ballad “Jabberwocky” appeared in translation by Vl. An eagle without a title and with the omission of the first stanza, which remains only at the end of the poem: In latest translation Carrll's bird Jubjub, having "teamed up" with Bandersnatch, turned into some kind of "Gossiping Snakes". Here it is worth reminding the reader that Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass” himself explains in detail (putting these explanations into the mouth of Humpty Dumpty) all the neologisms of the first (and last) stanza of the ballad “Jabberwocky”. "Brillig" (in Russian translations "soup", "brewed", "boiled", "rozgren", "sparkled"), says Humpty Dumpty, means four o'clock in the afternoon, when they begin to cook dinner. "Stithy" means "lithe" and “slimy”, i.e. “flexible or lively” and “slippery.” “You see,” Humpty explains to Alice, “this word is like a wallet. You open it, and there are two compartments." The next nonsense word that Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice is “toves” (in Russian translations “kozi”, “yashchuki”, “shorki”, “homeyki”, “here”).” Toves,” he says, are something like badgers, but at the same time they look like lizards and corkscrews. “They must be very funny creatures,” Alice responds. Humpty Dumpty adds that these animals build nests in the shade sundial, and eat cheese. The verb “gimble,” Carroll further explains through the lips of his hero, means “to drill like a gimlet” (Gimble is also a full-fledged English word, though dialectal, meaning “to make a face,” but Carroll gave it additional meaning , a new connotation.), and "wabe" - "plot around hourglass“, clever Alice herself guessed. Humpty Dumpty clarifies that this plot extends in front of the clock, behind the clock and, as Alice adds, on both sides of the clock. The next “wallet word” is the adjective “mimsy”, which, according to Carroll, is simultaneously means "fragile, thin" and "pathetic, wretched". For translators of the ballad into Russian, Carroll's "were mimsy" takes on the form of "quietly sad", "were sad", "grunted", "yayed", "trembled". "Borogoves " - these are Carroll's skinny, shabby birds with feathers sticking out in all directions, similar to a living mop. In Russian translations - “misiki”, “moplets”, “zelyuki”, “briskuncheyki”, “clusters”. The word “mome” means " lost their way" (abbreviated "from home"), and "raths" - "green pigs" (in Russian translations "zelenavki", "zelinya", "myumziki", "kryukh"). And, finally, "outgrabe", concludes Humpty Dumpty, this is either a moo or a whistle interrupted by a sneeze. In Russian translations, “khryushchali,” “chkhryli,” “grunted,” “furious.” From all of the above it follows that Carroll’s intended meaning of the first (and last) quatrain of the ballad "Jabberwocky" has approximately next view: "Four o'clock in the afternoon. Slippery and flexible badgers, looking like lizards and corkscrews, were spinning in a whirlwind and boring the grass near the hourglass - in front of them, on the side and behind them. Skinny and pitiful birds, reminiscent of a living mop, and green pigs who had lost their way or something mooed or whistled, interrupting these sounds with sneezing.” Familiarization with the five central stanzas of the ballad "Jabberwocky" shows that it contains a number of "mysterious" words, all of them adjectives: "frumious, vorpal, manxome, uffish, tulgey, frabjous." For further analysis of the nonsense of the ballad "Jabberwocky", it is very important that Lewis Carroll was not only a mathematician and writer, but also an outstanding linguist. From a young age, he carefully delved into the meaning and etymology of almost every word he used, not to mention the fact that he graduated from Christ Church College with honors not only in mathematics, but also in classical languages. He fell in love with word games early and invented many word puzzles, word games and ciphers. The problem of word formation was one of the most interesting areas of linguistics for Carroll. It should be said that Carroll loved creating new words all his life. Now, finally, we can turn to those neologisms that Carroll used in the second, third, fourth and fifth stanzas of the ballad “Jabberwocky”, and identify their word-forming elements. “Do what you want with adjectives,” says Humpty Dumpty to Alice, explaining that some words are very harmful and refuse to be obeyed. “Especially the verbs! There’s too much ambition in them!... However, I can cope with them all.”
Rybakov saw a play with words in L. Carroll's fairy tales. And K.I. Chukovsky emphasized how important this game is for a child’s development and how exciting it is for him - the discovery of direct and figurative meanings of words, the possibilities of transforming them, creating his own words, “absurd absurdities,” funny poems and counting rhymes. And from the first page, from the first lines of Carroll’s fairy tales, his young reader is involved in this game: together with Alice, he wonders how it is possible to “sit down for a minute (in the original - “stop a minute”) and whether she will allow it; is it possible to “see anyone”: what, in fact, does the expression “were depressed” mean... These examples can be continued endlessly, they are on each of the two hundred pages of Alice’s adventures. It is interesting that Carroll unites the attitudes towards words characteristic of children at different times of life: children’s fantastic etymologies, puns, and comic “grammar exercises” based on the material of the first school language lessons.
Chukovsky in his book subtly noted that the game of “reversing” the meanings of words begins when the child has already precisely mastered these meanings: in THIS game he takes the next step - discovers their ambiguity, the ability to look at an elephant, at people, at things in different ways ,
Children very animatedly find out the meaning of such fictitious absurd words obtained by mechanical addition. In continuation, the preschoolers themselves, by analogy with L. Carroll’s fairy tale, offer their “absurdities” to both their peers and the teacher so that they can unravel their origin.
In both worlds, one of the most important and powerful characters is not any person, but the English language, notes W. H. Auden. Alice, who previously considered words to be passive objects, discovers that they are willful and have a life of their own.
But it turns out that you can talk about nothing, as in Carroll’s ballad “Jabberwocky,” where a sonorous romantic verse tells the story of how “someone killed someone.” The words themselves are not associated with any images at all, but their grammatical functions are clearly highlighted. It turns out that the grammatical rules connecting the elements of a phrase carry a semantic load in addition to the elements themselves.
But, as we have already seen in the example with “Jabberwocky”, the point here is not in new words, but in the ability to talk about the unimaginable, about things that have no similarity in everyday life, but have the structure of a certain language, so that you can guess “who” , "what" and "how".
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" can be called, without exaggeration, the pinnacle of the nonsense genre. Nonsense, as it were, reinterprets and “turns inside out” ordinary life connections, however, it does not mean at all, as one might assume from the direct translation of this word, simply “nonsense”, “nonsense” and that there is some deep meaning hidden in it. However, what kind of meaning lies in it, everyone interprets it in their own way.
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" belongs to the genre of literary fairy tales, but its distinctive feature is the special organization of temporal and spatial relations. Here Carroll is original, offering his solutions, which are in many ways qualitatively different than in contemporary literary fairy tales or traditional folklore images.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland uses the motif of sleep as a special way of organizing the world of a fairy tale. The dream does not “turn on” immediately, leaving room for a very real beginning. No matter how short this beginning is, it roots Alice in real, “biographical” time. The fairy tale begins and ends like ordinary Victorian tales of the mid-century, only a dream introduces fairy-tale motifs into it. Events in “Wonderland” do not take place in “a certain kingdom, a certain state,” infinitely far from Victorian England, both in time and in space, they take place “here” and “now.” In this, Carroll's tale differs not only from folk tales, but also from the vast majority of tales created by his contemporaries. This construction of a fairy tale allows us to talk about a real, “biographical”, on the one hand, and a fairy-tale, on the other, type of organization of time. Fairytale time does not mean the time of the entire fairy tale as a whole, but the fairytale time of dreams.
The dream itself is a kind of lever that “turns on” and “turns off” the main fairy-tale action with its special characteristics. In “Alice,” the motif of a dream arises in the literal sense of the word, although the writer at the beginning of the tale never says that it was a dream. Alice, sitting on a hot day on the river bank next to her sister, who is reading a book “without pictures” and “conversations” (what’s the point of a book if there are no pictures or conversations in it?) – falls asleep. Then follows the fairy tale itself, which is obviously just a dream for Alice. In the end, the dream ends, and with it the fairy tale ends.
N.M. Demurova notes that real and fairy-tale time (i.e., the time of conception and dreaming) are interconnected in one more way: events, objects and people of Alice’s real world every now and then penetrate into the fairy-tale world (interweaving of worlds). There is no impenetrable barrier between these worlds. Wonderland is perceived by Alice as a “foreign” country, inhabited by strange creatures living according to their own laws, incomprehensible to Alice, and influencing the heroine herself in a strange, incomprehensible way.
In Alice’s thoughts and speeches there is a constant comparison between Wonderland and ordinary, real life. She remembers every now and then what she was like in that life, what she knew, what she could do, what habits she had, books, pets, etc. The usual way of life and everyday life, a set of rules, etc. - all this passes before the readers either in the internal monologues of the heroine herself, or in the author’s text that conveys her thoughts. The contrast between the world of Wonderland and the familiar world is interpreted by Alice herself as a gap between “today” and “yesterday.” “No, just think! - she says. - Which Today strange day! A yesterday everything went as usual! Maybe it was me who changed overnight? Let me remember: this morning when I got up, was it me or not me? It seems that I’m not quite me anymore! But, if this is so, then who am I in this case? It's so difficult...”
As noted by N.M. Demurov, a dream (dream, play of imagination, creativity) appears throughout the entire fairy tale as the most important moment that models the very world of the fairy tale. For spatio-temporal relations in Carroll's fairy tale, it is the complex relationship between “dream” (i.e., the world created by the imagination) and reality that is of fundamental importance. In “Wonderland,” its real time is invaded by the fabulous time of “dream,” breaking the “biographical,” linear sequence of time. How many (minutes? hours?) Alice slept clearly does not know.
Between the “biographical beginning” (Alice is languishing, still on a hot day on the shore; thinking about whether to get up and pick flowers, she imperceptibly falls asleep) and the “biographical” ending (Alice wakes up, and her sister sends her off to drink tea), occupying only a very short period of time, a certain “exclusion” extends from the real flow of time, which occurs with the help of the magic word “suddenly”: “Suddenly a White Rabbit with red eyes ran past...”. Reversal into linear time occurs at the moment highest voltage, when, waving and fighting off the raging guests, Alice suddenly wakes up. “Alice, honey, wake up! - said the sister. “How long have you been sleeping!” Linear time closes, leaving fairy-tale time outside its boundaries.
The fairy-tale time of Wonderland is not only physically excluded from the “biographical” series, but also psychologically it does not in any way determine the life of the heroine, and does not in any way correlate with her real existence. It is extremely abstract and exists on its own. In Wonderland there is neither day nor night; the sun does not shine there, the moon does not shine, there are no stars in the sky; Yes, in fact, there is no sky itself. If a clock appears (in the chapter about the Mad Tea Party), it does not show the hour, but the date, and besides, it is also “two days behind.”
The same chapter mentions that today is the fourth, but does not mention the month at all. Finally, the reader learns that the Hatter quarreled with Time back in March, “just before this one (he pointed at the March Hare with a spoon) went crazy,” and in revenge, Time stopped the clock at six. All this information related to the figure of Time only mystifies readers.
Along with these changes in time, in the author’s speech, as well as in the speech of Alice and other characters in the fairy tale, expressions are sometimes used that are supposed to indicate a certain time duration or sequence: “in a minute,” “in a moment,” “I’ll wait a little,” etc. However, These expressions have a rather abstract meaning: they are linguistic clichés, conventions of speech that are not related to reality. Time exists only as a certain order, a sequence of episodes, in turn marked by various segments of space.
Demurova notes that the causal connections in the sequence of episodes themselves are also extremely weakened; If we exclude some unimportant moments associated with the sudden growth or decrease of the heroine, we can safely say that they do not exist at all. In fact, the meeting with the Mouse and her “long story” do not in any way lead to the meeting with the White Rabbit, the meeting with the White Rabbit is not causally connected with the meeting with the puppy, and this latter one with the Blue Caterpillar.
Demurova does not find any causal connection between the advice of the Blue Caterpillar and the meeting with the Duchess, and the Cheshire Cat, even if he shows Alice the way to two madmen - the Hatter and the March Hare, then immediately adds: “It doesn’t matter who you go to. Both are out of their minds." As a matter of fact, according to the researcher, any of the participants in the previous episode can easily show the way to the characters of the next episode: this function is purely official. This is why episodes within a fairy tale can be easily rearranged.
The fairy-tale time of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” exists thanks to some rather abstract fairy-tale space. It does not occur immediately, but through a series of sequential switchings. After a very real beginning, the invasion of the fairy tale begins with the word “suddenly” (the White Rabbit appears). Then a dream begins in which Alice scurries into the hole after the Rabbit, and a qualitatively new space opens up. The hole turns out to be of such a size that a 7-year-old girl can easily pass into it, then it goes straight, and then suddenly breaks off, so that Alice begins to fall, as if into a deep well (new space), which is either very deep, or has one more additional fabulous property: they fall into it slowly, the walls are lined with cabinets and shelves, and in some places it is hung with paintings and maps. All this serves to organize the fairy-tale space in order to give it some reality.
Another one creeps unnoticed into space during the fall. Repeating and varying her question about whether cats eat midges and midges eat cats, Alice “felt that she was falling asleep.” Here the reader encounters a special technique of “dream within a dream.” When the well ends, Wonderland itself begins as a uniquely organized space. This is a vast country, consisting of many local spaces, little similar to each other and following one after another without any transitions. Nothing perhaps illustrates this better than the relationship between the underground hall and the forest. These are two different spaces that are included in each other and are connected in a direct way from the latter to the former.
In addition to various transformations affecting individual parts of the space of the Land of Wonders, there is also a certain general pattern that concerns, obviously, not individual particulars and parts, but the entire underground space as a whole. This space has the ability to contract and expand, an ability that is practically unlimited. Of course, this property of underground space is directly dependent on the transformations occurring with the heroine herself, who either rapidly decreases or grows just as rapidly.
Transformations of space are determined by what happens to the heroine herself. So the puddle of tears she cried when she was 9 feet tall turns into a sea in which Alice herself, catastrophically reduced in stature, swims, as does the Mouse, the Dodo, and many other animals and birds. The fairy tale ends with Alice, having grown to her natural size, being able to properly relate herself and the characters of “Wonderland” (“Who are you afraid of?” she exclaims). Despite all the abstractness, fragmentation and incompleteness of the fairy-tale space in Wonderland, strangely, it does not irritate the reader.
Three inserted poems, which have a certain independence and completeness: “Sea Quadrille”, “This is the Voice of Omar”, “I Was Walking in the Garden One Day...”, exist autonomously and are characterized by their own time and space: the sea, the sandbank, the garden. And yet they “flow” and “merge” with the space of Wonderland.
At the end (in real time) there is a two-fold repetition of the wonderful events that befell Alice. First, Alice, upon waking up, tells her dream to her sister, then it passes before her sister’s inner gaze. Thus, a threefold repetition is created, if we keep in mind the fairy tale itself, the repetition enhances the effect of the narrative, connecting it with folklore threefold repetition. Also, the repetitions seem to summarize all of the above and lead to an impressive finale.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll makes extensive use of folk art. Based on it, he creates deeply original images and situations that are in no way a simple repetition or reproduction of folklore stereotypes. This combination of the traditional gives a special charm to Carroll's tales.
The structure of a folk tale undergoes changes under Carroll's pen. Alice's "sending" down the rabbit hole is not prepared in any way, it is spontaneous and not connected with anything previous. The “shortage” appears only when, looking through the keyhole, Alice sees a garden of amazing beauty behind the locked door.
The first main “shortage” is followed by a number of particular ones associated with various inconsistencies in Alice’s height relative to the height of the table on which the key lies, the keyhole and crack, etc. “Elimination” of the main “shortcoming” (when Alice opens the door with the key and ends up in the garden ) does not lead to a denouement: the wonderful garden turns out to be a kingdom of chaos and arbitrariness. None of these episodes are prepared by the previous action and are not “paired” with the elements of the beginning or resolution of the action.
The denouement is just as unprepared by traditional moves as the beginning. And if the “lack” in a folk tale may be absent at the beginning, appearing only after the necessary “sending” of the hero, then the spontaneity and unreasonableness (from the point of view of tradition) of the denouement constitutes its striking difference from the folklore norm. The rigid design of cause-and-effect relationships, characteristic of a folk tale, the principle of “pairing”, “acting out” in “Wonderland” is decisively increased. The fairy tale ends when Alice managed to “liquidate” the main “shortage” and not because she managed to do this, the dream simply ends, and with it the fairy tale.
Other functions of the actors undergo similar transformations. They have not yet been completely destroyed, they are still felt as such, however, their quality and relationships have been greatly changed. So, in Carroll’s fairy tale, “donors” appear: the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit and others, who question, “test”, “attack” the hero, thereby preparing to receive magic remedy or assistant. However, following these riddles, questions, and tests, Alice learns about the next step that she must take.
Other functions are weakened in a similar way: spatial movements, guidance, “supply”, obtaining a magical remedy, fighting, etc. The weakening of these and other canonical fairy tale functions occurs not only due to violations of cause-and-effect relationships or violations of the composition and interaction of the primary elements of a fairy tale , but also due to the ironic understanding of everything that is happening, that special romantic quality that distinguished all of Carroll’s work. The instrument of the fairy tale canon is the dream, which mixes connections, arbitrarily violates the traditional “pairing”, etc.
The text of the tale contains many folklore song borrowings. The final chapters of Wonderland (the trial of the Knave) are based on the old folk style. Carroll not only includes old folk songs in his tales, he unfolds them into entire prose episodes, preserving the spirit and character of folk heroes and events.
In addition to direct borrowings from folk songs, indirect borrowings also play a role in Carroll’s tale. One of the channels of such indirect folklore influence for Carroll was the limericks of Edward Lear, an eccentric poet and draftsman who published “The Book of Nonsense” in 1846, which originally developed a special part of the folklore heritage of England associated with “madmen” and “eccentrics.”
In Carroll's tale, strange images captured in proverbs and sayings come to life. “Mad as a March Hare” - this proverb was recorded in a collection of 1327, it was used by Chaucer in his “Canterbury Tales”. The March Hare, together with the Hatter, another patented madman, albeit of a new time, becomes the heroes of “Wonderland.” The Cheshire Cat owes its smile, and the very fact of its existence, also to old proverbs. “He smiles like a Cheshire cat,” the British said back in the Middle Ages.
And in the collection of 1504 there is a proverb: “Cats are not forbidden to look at kings.” The old proverb “Stupid as an oyster,” according to R.L. Greene, "revived to new life" in Punch by Teniell's caricature (19 January 1861), perhaps the origin of Carroll's oyster sketch in Wonderland. Rooted in the depths of national consciousness, these phrases were realized under Carroll's pen into detailed metaphors that define the characters and their actions.
Folklore turns everything upside down, turns it inside out, changes big to small, small to big, cold to warm, warm to cold. Folklore plays with “reversals” and “reversals” in food, clothing, natural phenomena, characters, objects of action, qualities, etc. Carroll boldly follows the folklore tradition (changes in the size of characters, digging apples from the ground, falling Alice reflects on what "antipathies" ("antipodes") in New Zealand walk upside down). Reversals of subject and object. “Do cats eat midges? Do midges eat cats? - sleepy Alice repeats, changing the characters' places. Reversal of parts and the whole, “alienates” parts of the body, giving them autonomy from the whole (for example, “alienation” of legs, from Alice herself, the Cheshire Cat has the ability to disappear and appear in parts, a forest in which names and names of objects disappear, etc.) .
At first, children and adults think that Carroll’s “Alice” is a collection of absurdities and nonsense, but, in fact, the fairy tale is a game, the rules of which are formulated for the attentive reader inside the text. After playing this game, young and adult readers change their ideas about the absoluteness of spatial boundaries that are accepted in everyday life, and the logic of language, so understandable, turns out to be mysterious. The reality we find ourselves in is very complex. On the one hand, it is dominated by the same type of rules, consequences and causes, laws of similarity, but, on the other hand, reality is so diverse that it requires extraordinary solutions that violate all the usual laws. And extraordinary solutions can only be obtained in a game, for example, one invented by the English storyteller Lewis Carroll.
Carroll plays by swapping up and down, subject and object, cause and effect; he plays by changing proportions and gradations; plays, “overestimating” and “underestimating” objects and actions; plays by offering false arguments. And in fact, the game seems to be the most important component of nonsense, which seems to be aimed at putting something unexpected and unusual in place of the usual, objective, expected, thereby confusing the ordinary idea of the world that the reader has. “Game of nonsense”, the strict orderliness (rules) of games (for example, cards) are combined in Carroll with disorder, the author’s invention.
Carroll loved creating new words all his life. Thus, in “Alice in Wonderland” the words “to uglify” and “uglification” appear, created by analogy with the words “to beautify” - “to decorate”. The Duchess also expressed the maxim: “Take care of the meaning, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” This is a modified English proverb “Take care of pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
The word itself often appears in Carroll as an object of a “game of nonsense,” taken no longer in its integrity and spontaneity, but as a subtle and complex structure that represents a convenient “playing field.” Numerous puns, generously scattered throughout Carroll's tale, are based on the play between the discrepancies between sound and meaning in a word, for example. This is the famous “long story” of the Mouse, in which the semantic discrepancy between the words “tale” (story) and “tail” (tail), identical in sound, “not” (negative particle) and “knot” (knot), is played out. In The Mad Tea Party - “well” (“well” and “good”) and “draw” (“scoop water” and “draw”), and much more.
Carroll is extremely diverse: he invents new types of “nonsense games”, carrying them out in new forms and categories. Of particular interest in this regard are Carroll's poetic parodies. In “Alice in Wonderland” there are “Papa William”, “Lullaby” sung by the Duchess, a song about a crocodile and a bat, “Sea Quadrille”, “That’s the Voice of a Lobster...”, a song by Quasi. However, the term “parody” as applied to these poems can hardly be considered quite accurate. All these poems, in one way or another, are connected with a certain “original”, someone else’s source text, which “shines through” in the background through Carroll’s “parodying” text. But the degree of connection with the source text is different in different cases: sometimes Carroll’s poem very closely repeats the “original”, making extensive use of its vocabulary, structure and the very structure of the lines, sometimes only individual details, rhythmic pattern, size, breathing are preserved. The attitude towards the source text and the purpose of “parody” are also related.
American researcher Beverly L. Clark believes that the question of whether the poems in the fairy tale “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” are parodies refers to the “problem of scarcity,” i.e. to what can be understood by the term “parody”. According to the researcher, this term has a narrower definition than is customary in Carroll studies.
B.L. Clark believes that only a satirical work that deliberately and openly ridicules the original can be called a parody. “As for Carroll,” she writes, “the writer did not simply put absurd meaning into the form of the original original; he often had in mind not only literary satire, but also a general moral critical “approach and view.”
The researcher considers only the poem from the second chapter of “Alice’s Travels in Wonderland” to be truly a parody. “How a little crocodile treasures its tail” (translation by O. Sedakova), since he really makes fun of one of the edifying divine songs of Isaac Watts, which calls on children to work. Unlike the heroine of Watts' song, i.e. a bee making a “tidy house” for itself - a honeycomb, Carroll’s little crocodile works, “swallowing fish whole.”
As a result, the “game of nonsense” draws into the fairy tale “Alice’s Travels in Wonderland” by Carroll more and more large units: from the word taken in its integrity, the unity of the text, to poems taken in their structural unity. Finally, the very structure of Carroll’s fairy tale also becomes the object of a “game of nonsense”: it is successively “maintained” and “violated,” “created” and “denied.”
Of course, the principle of “order-disorder”, “orderliness-disorderliness” is present in all types human activity in general and in any type of creativity, including literary creativity. However, nowhere, except for nonsense, does this principle become in itself the subject, content and method of artistic representation. This is the artistic specificity of nonsense in all its prose and poetic varieties, its philosophy, its dialectics. “Games of imagination”, which are present in full in “Alice,” consist in creating ridiculous and humorous situations that are impossible in life, but such as a child dreams of.
There is an opinion that this is not a children's fairy tale at all. It hides under a light cover many problems that are not childish. D. Urnov suggests trying, following the principle of L. Carroll himself, to start counting, to estimate how many times throughout the entire story Alice screams and squeals, and you will see that this is a very nervous fairy tale, that the world in which Alice lives is actually disturbing. How many tears, fights, one chase after another! “First the verdict, and then the investigation” - and this is a trial in “Wonderland.”
In general, in terms of the contradictory interpretations evoked, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” could to some extent compete with “The Tragic Story of Prince Hamlet.” In L. Carroll's book they saw a neurotic nightmare, and an allegorical polemic on religious problems, and political strife, comically presented, and nothing at all other than childish fun.
A commonplace in the study of L. Carroll’s work has become references to the fact that “The Mad Tea Party” shows the tedious routine of English home life, and in the final chapters of the book, where the case of the missing cupcakes is being investigated by the royal court, British litigiousness is satirically depicted. Here satire appears in the most noticeable forms, but essentially throughout the entire story, every now and then various kinds of “nonsense” and “stupidity” are ironically displayed.
Stupidity in everything, right down to the manner of saying “hello - goodbye,” because the entire ritual of everyday life is performed according to the principle of mechanical execution of accepted rules. The swagger of lackeys repeating the same thing one after another, the rudeness of gentlemen, the annoying scrupulousness of the White Rabbit. “Oh, I'm late! Oh, what will happen! Oh, the Duchess will be angry!”, emptiness small talk, a chaotic crowd of “races” organized by Dodo, which personify the confusion of all kinds of meetings and public discussions, where instead of a purposeful competition of opinions, everyone tramples at random and believes as a result that they “won” - everything is “crazy”.
Representatives of critical schools approach “Alice’s Journey in Wonderland” from all sides, fully armed with analytical equipment, and find everything from surrealism to the theory of relativity. There is mathematical logic or relativism there, but that was also felt by one of the first attentive readers of the book, the artist Tenniel, who, believing his impression, depicted Alice as a childish girl. Lewis Carroll himself wanted to see “the unclouded brow of a child,” however, he later reconciled himself, because this is not a children’s book for children.
A.A. Milne admired Lewis Carroll, however, he wrote about children in his own way: he created a world of simple, ingenuous childhood.
There was one objective circumstance that allowed Milne to achieve such a result. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland turned out to be a disguised "adult" book, not only because of the author's inclinations, but also because it was a path to problems that Victorian hypocrisy would otherwise not allow to touch. In Milne's time, children's literature was left to children as English literature as a whole matured.
A.A. Milne created a work beloved by children and their parents, probably because it’s like they’re playing Winnie the Pooh together, and this book unites them. It should be emphasized that A. Milne’s fairy tale “Winnie the Pooh” was born as a spoken word, or more precisely, as a game. The stories about Winnie the Pooh and his friends are the fruit of the collective creativity of the family, as Milne assured, it is like an epic, and he only got the modest role of a chronicler. In the process of playing with little Christopher, all his toys (Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga and Roo) each acquired their own biography, a distinct character, their own habits, habits, preferences, and manner. conversation. This is how the oral, typically family tale broke through into literature.
Winnie the Pooh himself is a child who knows nothing, but wants to know everything. Sawdust, as L. Lungina notes, “is a humorous sign, a metaphor for life experience, absolute ignorance. Gradually we get to know all his friends, and every time we watch their passion.
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