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ALICE'S ADVENTURES AT THE CARNIVAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Mark M. Hennelly Jr.
Mark M. Hennelly Jr.*
Affiliation:
California State University, Sacramento
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Extract

Imagine a story featuring a dreamy descent underground, grotesquely gigantic and dwarfish carnality, a prodigious pool of body fluid, cartwheels and pratfalls, cornucopian helpings of food and drink, antic playgrounds, riddling language and name games, repeated nonsense (re)verses, various negative capabilities, mathematical miracles, voyages of discovery, cycles of crowning and uncrowning, not to mention metalists like the previous catalogue in this sentence. It seems curious that this tangled tale, Lewis Carroll's in the Alices, has never been linked to the Carnival tradition typified by François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) even though our imagined story equally describes Rabelais's glorious epic. At least, it's never been linked much beyond Northrop Frye's suggestion that “[t]he Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley's] The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais” (310) and Martin Gardner's note to Looking-Glass that Medieval and “Renaissance chess games were sometimes played with human pieces on enormous fields” as in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (135, n. 2). And yet, to spin William Empson's memorable take on Freudian readings (357), one has only to tell Alice's story to make it a carnival tale.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 103 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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