There have been a few ups and downs here recently, mainly in the mummy plays nurse department. In the space of less than a week, two separate days off school, and a trip to A&E. My basis for operating is feeling a little shaky. I need a point of reference when life is turned upside down.
But whatever has been going on this last week, I have not had to deal with shrinking or growing. Being attacked by a pack of cards. Suddenly discovering I am turning into a large insect. Those kind of upside downs. Thankfully not.
One of my English teachers at school was allowed one book to take with him when he did military service (or so he told the class). For whatever reason, he packed Alice in Wonderland. Something of the confusing world of Wonderland, with many things unexplained, seemed to offer perspective for that period of his life.
I reread Alice within the last year and realised its strangeness once more. In some ways, it is more a series of scenes sewn together – some do seem to build, some less so. I am still unsure about the purpose of Little Bill, mentioned when Alice is too big and stuck inside the house.
At school, we went a stage further – The Annotated Alice was on the A Level booklist. I found the process partly interesting, partly a little sad – it is nicer sometimes to believe in nonsense for nonsense’ sake, rather than discover its roots in situations belonging to Lewis Carroll’s everyday world.
In the annotated version, things are allowed to make some sense. We come to see that the brilliant Jabberwocky poem (in the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass) has its basis in a spoof version of Anglo-Saxon.
But for Alice, making her way through Wonderland, the world does not make sense – and few of the characters offer explanations.
At another extreme are Kafka’s short stories, which I came to read at university. The sense of having your balance shifted for you is strong. Characters begin as one thing and swiftly become something very different, particularly Gregor who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant ‘unclean’ insect.
In Kafka’s worlds, there are no explanations. The shifts, the changes, are not just unexpected – they are beyond believable, to the ‘normal’ world, but they acquire a kind of internal logic as they develop. You can see where they are going at times, as the reader, but are powerless to stop them – with that same note of anguish that you find in Greek tragedies.
There are other stories out there which deal more directly with ‘why me? why this? why now?’. The book of Job is one that people turn to when trying to make sense of confusion and upheaval in their lives. Job’s world too goes from what seems ‘humanly possible’ to scenarios of extreme loss and pain.
But there is also something gained by reading stories of non-sense set in other worlds. We can both enter into the descriptions of confusion, and separate ourselves from them. We can empathise with unfairness, lack of help, lack of explanation – and also view these from the outside.
We emerge feeling understood – and able to view the circumstances from a more objective position, somehow. We are reassured in seeing that the world is madly incomprehensible, but that there are worse worlds, greater non-sense than we are currently experiencing.
Perhaps, through this reading process, we become able, like Alice, to pull away from going further inward. We may not as easily be able to stand and say of our situations ‘you’re nothing but a pack of cards!’, but we can challenge ourselves to look outward again, and to take action.
Just as books can help us when we despair, when we rage, so too they can accompany us on our journeys of confusion at the world.
We may not understand what is happening to us, but through this kind of reading, we ourselves are, once again, understood.
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