Carroll was a professional mathematician

Sombre auteur, Tim Burton, takes on Lewis Carroll in what has been dubbed the new-age Gothic version of Alice in Wonderland. While Burton fans revel in excitement, noted quite conspicuously at Comic Con earlier this year, Alice zealots are worried what effect the imminent and eerie film will have on the much loved children’s classic. Truth is, Alice was not written for children.

Not until Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll did nonsense become a literary genre, and both might turn in their graves to discover that because of them it has. According to Vivien Noakes, lecturer and authority on Lear, nonsense “meant something happy and inconsequential” which resists the definition sought after by literary genres.

George P. Landow, Professor of English and History of Art at Brown University, says that perhaps the idea of nonsense writing is a universe of words “that only occasionally hold tight to what we think as accepted reality.” A combination of elements, including riddles, characters and situations are used to create incongruity which serves to separate words from their meaning, making them nonsensical.

Typical of the genre, is the focus on the sound of the word over the meaning making for some amusing limericks, bad puns and always a stark juxtaposition of a words’ intended and possible meanings. 

One of the unique effects of such a literary device is detachment – notably emotional detachment from the writer and reader to the characters, which, according to Noakes, once established makes “it quite acceptable and not at all distressing to find a man being baked in an oven or coiled up like a length of elastic”, giving the illusion of children’s literature.

The puzzles and mathematical jokes and codes hidden in Alice’s book further compound the notion that the children’s classic was not intended (at least beneath face value) for kids. Joining Alice in Chapter 7 at the Mad Tea-Party, the Hatter and the Doormouse use mathematical reason, namely inverse relationships, to argue that “I see what I eat” is not the same as “I eat what I see”.

More than this however, the book, according to some, serves as a critique of the Victorian society and its absurdity, or nonsense. Three cards painting white roses red to avoid being beheaded takes a satirical look at the war between the red and white queens, where red roses symbolise the English House of Lancaster and white the House of York in the War of the Roses.

Whether for children or not, however, Burton, with his typical flare for musical and horror, such as 2007’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, makes him perfectly poised to capture the nonsense lying somewhere between words and sounds. Previews of the 3D remake of the Disney classic look set to please both Burton and Carroll fans, save for Terry Pratchett.

Visit Tim Burtons brilliantly interactive website or the official Disney Alice mini-site or view the Alice in Wonderland – Official Trailer [HD].

By Jason Esch