Fantasy/SF Micro-essay #2: Alice in Wonderland
Sunday, August 19th, 2012 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner[Another essay I wrote for Rabkin's course. This is the one my peer graders found too academic.]
It's an old adage of uncertain origin that in fantasy or science fiction you need strange people, strange things or strange places, but if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, you have too much strangeness, and you end up with surrealism, nonsense rhymes or dream narrative. Alice In Wonderland comes very close to this; it is surreal in places, contains several famous nonsense rhymes and at the end is revealed to be a dream. It is certainly dream-like and follows the warped logic of dreams with its gleeful absurdity and incessant punning, rather than the logic of fantasy, which changes a few things (notably magic) but sets these strange things in a world which generally behaves quite normally - what Melissa Thomas calls "the ‘Blue Skies, Green Grass’ theory" (60).
What keeps Alice just inside the boundaries of fantasy literature is the character of Alice and her responses to the worlds she is hurled into. "Curiouser and curiouser" is not the response we would expect from someone whose body was being stretched out "like the largest telescope that ever was"; blind terror is. Alice does not go mad like the heroes of H.P. Lovecraft, nor does she suspect she is mad, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. Rather, she accepts that something is strange and continues with child-like logic to elaborate on the implications of the strangeness, as when, having been telescoped, she contemplates the absurdity of sending presents to her feet. Even when she is presented with events which should be terrifying, like the giant dog in Through the Looking Glass, the narrative merely notes that Alice was "very frightened" before she returned to her normal state of bemused curiosity.
This continual harping on the strangeness of her experiences actually makes Alice a pillar of normality, placing her in a tradition that starts with fairy-tale protagonists and continues with fantasy characters like Bilbo Baggins, all of whom provide an amusingly normal perspective on abnormal events.
Thomas, Melissa. "Teaching Fantasy: Overcoming the stigma of fluff." The English Journal 92.5. pp. 60-64.
It's an old adage of uncertain origin that in fantasy or science fiction you need strange people, strange things or strange places, but if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, you have too much strangeness, and you end up with surrealism, nonsense rhymes or dream narrative. Alice In Wonderland comes very close to this; it is surreal in places, contains several famous nonsense rhymes and at the end is revealed to be a dream. It is certainly dream-like and follows the warped logic of dreams with its gleeful absurdity and incessant punning, rather than the logic of fantasy, which changes a few things (notably magic) but sets these strange things in a world which generally behaves quite normally - what Melissa Thomas calls "the ‘Blue Skies, Green Grass’ theory" (60).
What keeps Alice just inside the boundaries of fantasy literature is the character of Alice and her responses to the worlds she is hurled into. "Curiouser and curiouser" is not the response we would expect from someone whose body was being stretched out "like the largest telescope that ever was"; blind terror is. Alice does not go mad like the heroes of H.P. Lovecraft, nor does she suspect she is mad, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. Rather, she accepts that something is strange and continues with child-like logic to elaborate on the implications of the strangeness, as when, having been telescoped, she contemplates the absurdity of sending presents to her feet. Even when she is presented with events which should be terrifying, like the giant dog in Through the Looking Glass, the narrative merely notes that Alice was "very frightened" before she returned to her normal state of bemused curiosity.
This continual harping on the strangeness of her experiences actually makes Alice a pillar of normality, placing her in a tradition that starts with fairy-tale protagonists and continues with fantasy characters like Bilbo Baggins, all of whom provide an amusingly normal perspective on abnormal events.
Thomas, Melissa. "Teaching Fantasy: Overcoming the stigma of fluff." The English Journal 92.5. pp. 60-64.
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