A failed post about Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893)

 

 "Less Bread! More Taxes!" - Title of chapter 1 of Sylvie and Bruno

Sylvie and Bruno is an experimental 2 part novel by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), its his last major work.

The story is divided into 2 main strands: a love triangle set in England between a doctor, Arthur, for the Lady Muriel, and a fairy tale parody of Oxford University, "Outland" with 2 fairy characters, the children of the title. Loosely connecting these two strands is the narrator, an elderly gentleman prone to a condition similar to narcolepsy who sees both these worlds, often in tandem. 

This summary is as close as I can approximate this novel for anyone. Somehow in the space of 2 years an aging Charles Dodgson decided to throw every idea he'd ever had into a novel and see if it stuck. Originating as a short story ("Bruno's Revenge", published in Aunt Judy's Magazine, 1867) the book grew ever complex, split into 2 parts and with seemingly endless tangents on Religion, Morality, and Love. It flopped upon release and faded into obscurity, with only major Carroll scholars and a few writers here and there acknowledging it. 

Whilst Dodgson at the time may have considered it to be his best piece of work, for the modern reader it is almost impossible to read (and I should know - I attempted it in 2020 and barely made it through, if it wasn't for friends) I was thinking over recently why this is just so hard to read, and realized that unlike later experimental novels or poetry, a context guide, notes or introduction has seemingly never materialized in the mainstream for Sylvie and Bruno. A scholarly annotated version exists: but it is not for the casual reader or carrollian. 

The context guide I found online last year seemed to give up halfway through, confusing one chapter for another.  This is an oversight in my eyes as a simple guide would make the whole book far less daunting to new readers and also explain just what Dodgson is saying in the sections where characters debate 19th century values. And also, why the concept of fairy children existed in Victorian literature and its link to mortality issues. 

This is a book which places you in a room in Outland (an Oxford parody) in chapter 1 with the phrase "-And then the people cheered again" and leaves you to slowly decipher its plot, or to wonder if it even has any grasp of one. Any idea of plot is tied up in Outland with a conspiracy by the Sub Warden and Chancellor to oust the Warden of the university, and in the real world, formed around Arthur and Muriel's relationship. Transitions from waking to dreaming flip back and forth so suddenly you may not be aware the narrator is awake or asleep. There are sections that work. There are sections that really don't. There are poems, often with a moral (something that a younger Dodgson would have winced at, most likely)

Within this maze, there is something to be commended: Dodgson tried to write one of the first experimental novels with only a vague idea of what he wanted. But I believe his ideas of this being a grand work, would be with editions that fully explained his vision, with notes and footnotes. 

At this moment the novel is hellishly difficult to understand because it requires you know 19th Century English culture, Oxford, Christianity and mental states well enough to engage with what Dodgson is offering. For most people (myself included) this is most likely too much to handle. 

I didn't want to dislike this book at all. But without proper context: it becomes almost utterly meaningless. 

NOTES:

• A case for this novel as extremely early Experimental Literature is made persuasively by Thomas Christensen's 1991 article for Right Reading. 

• An abridged version of the novels, called "The Story of Sylvie and Bruno" was published in 1904 and includes only the Outland strand of the narrative. Many translations omit the social realism side of the story, for example in Polish. 

All in the golden afternoon (Poem by Lewis Carroll, 1865)

NOTE

This poem is about the boating party in the Summer of 1862. As ever with Dodgson it is laced with a lethal wit. Here Dodgson jokingly identifies himself as the "wary one" the storyteller, Prima is Lorina, Secunda is Alice, and Tertia is Edith. The three Liddell sisters who along with Canon Robinson Duckworth, heard the tale of Alice over the summer. In the poem, they are jokingly referred to as the "cruel three", the people that make the teller of the Alice tale keep going. The "dreamchild" that is in this poem refers to the fictional Alice. Dodgson always took great pains to differentiate the fictional Alice of his stories from his friend Alice Liddell. 

ALL in the golden afternoon

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretence

Our wanderings to guide.

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,

Beneath such dreamy weather,

To beg a tale of breath too weak

To stir the tiniest feather!

Yet what can one poor voice avail

Against three tongues together?

Imperious Prima flashes forth

Her edict 'to begin it' -

In gentler tone Secunda hopes

'There will be nonsense in it!' -

While Tertia interrupts the tale

Not more than once a minute.

Anon, to sudden silence won,

In fancy they pursue

The dream-child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In friendly chat with bird or beast -

And half believe it true.

And ever, as the story drained

The wells of fancy dry,

And faintly strove that weary one

To put the subject by,

"The rest next time -" "It is next time!"

The happy voices cry.

Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

Thus slowly, one by one,

Its quaint events were hammered out -

And now the tale is done,

And home we steer, a merry crew,

Beneath the setting sun.

Alice! a childish story take,

And with gentle hand

Lay it were Childhood's dreams are twined

In Memory's mystic band,

Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers

Pluck'd in a far-off land. 

4th of July

(Dodgson's original drawing of the fictional Alice, via British Libary)

Today marks 4th of July 1862, the day that Charles Dodgson, on a whim during a boat trip in Oxford, began telling the story that would become Alice's adventures in Wonderland to Robinson Duckworth, Edith Liddell, Alice Liddell, and Lorina Liddell. The tale continued over subsequent weeks and further into the summer.

(Photo, detail of Christ Church, Oxford, image by Wordlander)

ARTE's documentary which now is uploaded with English subtitles to my Youtube and Archive.org (with thanks to @Hatteriastrange for subbing) goes into this day in more detail :)

Hosseinpour and Lunn's Alice should not exist: an essay

"People like Will Self who... described Dodgson as " indisputably a pedophile" and Waldemar Janudczak "the disgusting Lewis Carroll" happily pass on old ideas without the slightest idea of the pedigree of the stuff they're reciting." - Karoline Leach, 1999

(All images used in this essay are by Agathe Poupeney and/or Ballet du Rhin and are owned by Divergance-images and Ballet Du Rhin)

With thanks to @Curiouserarchive  for proof reading this essay! 

Amir Hosseinpour and Jonathan Lunn's ballet Alice (2022) was announced by Ballet de l'opera national du Rhin in 2021, amongst other projects for the ballet and opera house. It was broadcast online in early April this year. Press notes were keen to emphasize Lunn and Hosseinpour's connections with composer Phillip Glass, who had provided a score. Glass donated the music but was not involved in shaping the ballet nor its storyline. Despite this, the piece is near-constantly referred to in the press as “Phillip Glass’s Alice.”

Upon hearing the score, Hosseinpour and Lunn found: “right away, we said to ourselves that it's Alice in Wonderland.” Originally an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the strategy of adaptation drastically shifted: the two choreographers became interested and mired in the “biography” of Charles Dodgson. It is currently unknown what books and source, if any, Hosseinpour and Lunn consulted. Interviews do not give this insight. We can guess that the choreographers did not consult any recent biographies or research as they describe:

"the story behind" the story... author Lewis Carroll, a relative of the children of the Liddell family, including... Alice with whom he had a troubled relationship.". 

The piece as a whole flirts heavily with what Franziska Kholt has coined as “the dangers of biopic realism,” someone's perceptions and personal opinions of a historical figure presented as objective fact via the biopic genre.

This fixation on the idea of scandal, harm, and abuse is one that has followed writers of fiction about Dodgson for decades. As scholar Will Brooker contends,

 "journalism thinks it knows [who Dodgson is] and assumes its readers agree". 

Although Brooker was talking about journalism, it is clear from a pattern of biopics (from Dennis Potter's Alice and Dreamchild to this work) that writers have long been captivated, maybe near obsessed with seeing Dodgson through this highly inaccurate lens. Why is this theory, the now much-debunked falsehood of “Dodgson the abuser,” still being perpetuated in 2022?

It is a great wonder that Alice (2022) got made at all. Was it Glass's music composition that persuaded du Rhin that this was a worthwhile project? Reviews skirt around the subject matter. Much like the press photos that did not show Dodgson for a long while, reviews seem desperate to leave this key main character out.

"The ballet becomes a tableau vivant in a setting....References abound, deliciously British " "Nourished by many influences, the joyful and unbridled dance is imbued with a strong theatricality"

These reviews praise the dancing, the music, the scenery, and the staging, anything to avoid mentioning Dodgson as a character and the loose plot of this piece. The few reviews that do are teeming with falsehoods about the man, feeding into myths:

 "this Alice does not evacuate the gray areas of a man that a Victorian education corseted down to a stutter that only disappeared when faced with children." 

" [A] solitary and isolated artist. A stuttering teacher in front of a particularly laughing and agitated classroom"

The paradox of Alice (2022) is that it exists despite decades of research to disprove everything in it. The wafer-thin veil of biography that is here will give no one any insight. 

Sunnyi Melles's Old Alice Hargreaves “remembers” events from the past, mixed in with scenes from Alice in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson (Marwik Schmitt) is introduced floating around in the pool of tears in a digital camera. He is later seen angrily screaming at some students in a classroom (who you might presume are meant to be Oxford undergraduates, but the scene never confirms itself as Christ Church). Throughout the whole piece, he frequently tries to harm and/or kidnap Young Alice (Susie Buisson). There’s a scene in the Duchess's kitchen where they dance around a giant Alice dress provocatively, Young Alice clad only in underclothes. There’s also a scene in a forest where Schmitt's Dodgson kidnaps Buisson's Alice through a door. 

These faux biographical interludes are interspersed with scenes from Alice in Wonderland with lurid twists: Young Alice smokes a cigar at the tea party, and a camera-like eye follows her around the hall of doors. The piece is punctuated with bizarre, off-putting recitations of Dodgson's poems which are almost slurred and often whispered to deliberately eerie effect (poems are from the Alice books and, painfully in one scene, Dodgson's personal poetry written to entertain his younger siblings).

There is no story, because none is afforded. Paradoxically for a piece about remembering, nothing biographically accurate IS remembered. It is instead a woozy mimic of several falsehoods which have been roundly debunked about Dodgson, an anti-memory piece. Research is not mandatory; indeed, if any was done, it would derail the Alice project significantly. The depth of the historical Liddell and Dodgson, lives lived, interests, friends, and loves are too much for the writers to bare. Dodgson's massive adult circle of friends, interest in art, and clandestine visits to seaside towns with adult ladies are all too inconvenient truths.

No realistic qualities can be seen in Dodgson or either of the Alices. They are simplistic. Dodgson is coded as bad because he harms and angers easily, resorting to abuse and then writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to “make up” for it. Appallingly, there is a scene of Schmitt's Dodgson writing the Alice tale JUST after he harms Buisson's Young Alice, two scenes so contrary to history that they never happened. 

Likewise, the two Alices are portrayed as victims and nothing else. Buisson's Young Alice must run from Dodgson, and Melles's Old Alice must remain trapped as a victim, gasping out poetry in her drawing room. The piece claims to care about Mrs Hargreaves looking back on her life, but it does not care for the historical woman. Caryl, Reginald, and family are not featured. Nothing outside of wholly imagined interactions with Dodgson are shown. Mimicking the equally bad taste Alice in China (2014), Alice (2022) enacts a ritual of harming the character of Dodgson onstage at the end of the piece. Here, Schmitt's Dodgson dies under a blood red moon, Melles’s Alice recovering a piece of paper from his jacket before declaring "One day you will see a bright dawn." Like China, Alice (2022) enacts this death so the audience can go home with the satisfaction that they have seen “a bad man punished.”

This piece invites its audience to hate Charles Dodgson the character (and by proxy the man himself) quite unlike any piece before it.  It has neither the authority nor the complexity to speak of the real man nor his era. It is not interested in that. Fortunately, a wealth of scholars very much are, and do not despise Charles Dodgson in the way this piece does. Lewis Carroll societies would not exist if the historical Dodgson did half of what this piece portrays him doing. The real shame is that Dodgson's descendants are powerless to stop pieces such as this. It is up to us, writers and scholars, to highlight and try to repair that damage.  

Sources:

Books:

Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: The Myth and Reality of Lewis Carroll. London: Peter Owen Press. 2015

Brooker, Will. Alice's adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. London: Continuum: 2004

Newspapers: 

Poizat, Helene, "The Ballet du Rhin in the land of Alice and Lewis, from Friday in Mulhouse" La Alsace, Published 8th of Feburary 2022. 

https://www.lalsace.fr/culture-loisirs/2022/02/08/diaporama-le-ballet-du-rhin-au-pays-d-alice-et-de-lewis-des-vendredi-a-mulhouse    

Noisette, Phillipe ""Alice", a marvel of ballet" Les Echos, Published 14th of February 2022. 

https://www.lesechos.fr/weekend/spectacles-musique/alice-une-merveille-de-ballet-1386890

Websites

Clairet, Jean-Luc "Alice by Philip Glass: The Rhine Opera Ballet in Wonderland" Resmusica.com Published 14th of February 2022. 

https://www.resmusica.com/2022/02/14/alice-de-philip-glass-le-ballet-de-lopera-du-rhin-au-pays-des-merveilles/ 

Candoni, Christophe "Alice, multiple heroine of a delirious ballet" Sceneweb.fr. Published 23rd of February 2022. 

https://sceneweb.fr/alice-choregraphie-de-amir-hosseinpour-et-jonathan-lunn-pour-le-ballet-de-lonr/ 

Photos:

Poupeney, Agathe "Divergence images: Alice/Phillip Glass/ Amir Hosseinpour/Jonathan Lunn" Divergence images, 2022.  

Various images, press photos from Opera National du Rhin.

Papers

Kholt, Franziska "Peter and Alice: the dangers of biopic Realism" 2013, The Lewis Carroll Review. Issue 50.