SOURCE: Hubert, Renée Riese. “The Illustrated Book: Text and Image.” In Intertexuality: New Perspectives in Criticism, edited by Jeanine Parisier Plottel and Hanna Charney, pp. 177-95. New York: New York Literary Press, 1978.

[In the following essay, Hubert uses a study of Alice in Wonderland to discuss the challenges inherent in the analysis of an illustrated text. Hubert compares the illustrations of Carroll, Tenniel, and Salvador Dali, who published an illustrated Alice in 1969, to demonstrate the differing relationships between word and image in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts.]

A study of the illustrated book requires an examination of why visual interpretation cannot exclusively be studied as a series of images subservient to a text. Alice in Wonderland is a useful choice for showing the methodological problems that arise in a study of the illustrated book.

The drawings in the original version of Alice in Wonderland (entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground) are by Carroll himself.¹ Although they might have been intended as suggestions to Tenniel, the artist who was to illustrate the final version, Tenniel may never have seen the sketches. Among the many later illustrations, those by the Surrealist, Dali, a prolific book illustrator, are the most provocative.² Lewis Carroll, included in L'Anthologie de l'Humour noir and in Le Dictionnaire du Surréalisme, was held in high esteem by the Surrealists, who praised both his polemical and fantastic tendencies. Thus Dali's interest in Alice in Wonderland cannot be construed as incidental. Therefore, the way in which the Surrealist painter distorted or enriched a text that pertains to children's literature, adventure stories, and satire against Victorianism should be most revealing. To provide the proper perspective, I shall comment briefly on the nature of the literary text and the scope of the original illustrations.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF CARROLL AND TENNIEL

Carroll always conceived of Alice as an illustrated book, and, according to Harry Levin, this attitude explains the scarcity of description.³ Carroll's sketches show an ordinary girl who makes extraordinary encounters and undergoes incredible transformations. The girl's reactions rather than the setting are emphasized; for example, a room conveys the idea of imprisonment. Carroll's drawings encourage his reader to identify with his character and her sudden physical changes and discomforts. Animals with eyes expressing self-awareness are put on a more or less equal footing with Alice. Her almost unchangeable countenance maintains the continuity of her identity, a continuity about which the literary character, especially in the final version, manifests doubt. With the appearance of the King, Queen, and Duchess, Carroll introduces caricature. Stiffness, extreme formality, anachronistic attire and setting make the rituals of the “heartless” queen appear absurd. Because Alice's Adventures Under Ground is about a girl to whom adventures happen, whereas Alice in Wonderland deals with a heroine who gradually goes on a journey, Carroll's sketches and Tenniel's engraving do not really pertain to the same text.

In Tenniel's illustrations, Alice again plays the central role, but this time she expresses awe, fear, or surprise in the presence of the constant transformation she undergoes and the unexpected emergence and behavior of the other protagonists. The animals are endowed with more pronounced human expression and greater individualization. Tenniel concentrates on quickly recognizable vignettes of Alice's adventures, often reducing the setting to bare outlines. The continuity of the plot is subordinated to the representation of key moments. Only the story of Jack is closely modeled on textual narration and the humorous ups and downs of its nonsense verse. Again, a different style characterizes the scenes involving the Queen of Hearts. Spontaneity, animation, and concision are replaced by stylization, heraldic design, static full-fledged pictorialization. In many scenes the attire of the characters stresses hierarchical functions to which neither their expression nor their gesture may conform. Tenniel has somehow taken cognizance of a shift within the book that Gilles Deleuze explains: “As the narrative unfolds, driving and sinking movements yield to sliding and slipping movements from left to right and right to left. Innermost animals become secondary and make room for tenuous playing card shapes.”⁴ Tenniel's court ceremonies heighten the paradox that amphibious creations have introduced from the beginning by their upright position and ambiguous dialogue with Alice.

Tenniel's interpretations, which offer no symbolic dimensions, obviously did not pave the way to the numerous psychoanalytical studies. Recently Hélène Cixous and Gilles Deleuze added their version of Carroll's works to those of John Skinner or Martin Grotjahn, which appeared about thirty years ago in the American Imago, all of them attempting to solve the riddle of the dull mathematics tutor who wrote imaginative children's books, the confirmed bachelor who enjoyed the companionship of the daughters of his friends.⁵ In his “Child as Swain,” Empson gives a penetrating reading, both Freudian and contextual: “A fall through a deep hole into the secret Mother Earth produces a new enclosed soul wondering who it is, what will be its position in the world, and how it can get out. It is in a long low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch), from which it can only get out to the fresh air and the fountains through a hole frighteningly too small.”⁶ Empson takes Carroll's sketches as partial proof for his Freudian interpretations; Carroll's Alice, when imprisoned in the rabbit hole, looks like a foetus; Tenniel's does not. As Alice suddenly grows bigger, then suddenly shrinks, for she is at moments given the control of her growth or development, Carroll, so Empson explains, unfolds the complexities of the child-adult dichotomy.

Empson also discusses political, literary, and verbal parody, as well as Victorian beliefs and attitudes towards science, economics, and ethics; intellectual systems in general are devaluated. Certain characters such as the White Rabbit and the Duchess satirically incarnate famous Victorians. Literary parody refers to the Romantic, especially Wordsworthian beliefs in the union of nature and child. Martin Gardner and Harry Levin allude to other forms of parody such as the poems that are takeoffs of popular songs of Carroll's times or to “burlesque or pathetic fallacy echoed from Tennyson's Maud.”⁷ Literary parody becomes untranslatable when, as in the case of Tenniel, it entails change of medium in addition to change of genre.

Numerous studies are devoted to the verbal and linguistic preoccupations of Lewis Carroll, among others Elizabeth Sewell's book on nonsense verse and the seven articles in the section on the “Discours” included in the Cahier de l'Herne edited by Henri Parisot.⁸ Critics were even tempted to extend logical positivism and Wittgensteinian theories not only to Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic but also to Alice in Wonderland.⁹ During the early adventures, Alice's questions remain unanswered. Communications appear so difficult that the polite, well-mannered heroine experiences a threat to her identity. During the later adventures, especially the tea party, officially labeled as mad, discontinuity lies beneath the surface of the dialogue. Explanations given as logical or foolproof depend on homonyms or verbal plays that tend to invalidate or distort systems of semantics. Words become the accomplices of dreams that can thrust Alice into new domains or open up their “gardens.” Linguistic as well as spatial explorations fascinate the level-headed Alice.

DALI'S ALICE

Dali could barely have taken into account interpretations that, as Deleuze states, constitute a wedding of the unconscious and language. Having formulated his own theories long before 1969, Dali was far too independent to lean on textual explications. Yet it is likely that Alice attracted him as a parody. In his own work this device played a significant part. His Slave of Michelangelo, epitome of endless human struggles, tries to free himself from a partially disintegrated tire. Fragments of Renaissance and baroque paintings enter into his own works such as the Resurrection of the Flesh only to lose their traditional meaning. Erotic transformations of Millet's Angélus du Soir pervade several of Dali's works, above all some of his illustrations of Les Chants du Maldoror, as well as his Angelus de Gala, where the woman portrayed in double sits on a plow or cart in front of a modified reproduction of Millet's painting. In his Conquête de l'Irrationnel, Dali explains his obsessions regarding certain world famous masterpieces as well as his desire to transform and systemize them, to use them as the very territory of his “idées délirantes”: “Art history must be particularly rewritten according to the method of paranoia-critical activity. According to the method, paintings as different on the surface as Millet's ‘The Angelus’ and Watteau's ‘Embarkation for the Cythere’ represent exactly the same subject and mean the same thing.”¹⁰

According to Sarane Alexandrian, Dali did not wish to translate a literary text into another medium but wished to provide a complementary experience, thus rejecting, at least implicitly, Tenniel's mimetic representations.¹¹ Both illustrators show Alice's “overgrown” arm emerging through a window frame. Tenniel remains faithful to the narration: the heroine blindly seeks to grab the rabbit. Dali's interpretation stresses eroticism: the shape and color of the arm, its relations to the caterpillar, the squashing of the butterfly—all bring out and even add to the hidden implications of the text. Each chapter includes an illustration sometimes lacking any overt correspondence with the text. Their presence can be explained by the continuous unfolding and recurrence of certain images. Moreover, in the loose leaf livre de peintre, the illustrations tend to acquire a certain autonomy. The narration, the social dimensions, the role of most characters, the obviously recognizable elements have not been transposed; in fact, they have almost disappeared in Dali's graphic interpretations. Alice, an adolescent girl, if not a grown-up, appears on all plates accompanied by her less feminine shadow, turning a skipping rope. Her duality, for she is at once child and no longer child, would seem to confirm Empson's interpretation. She shows no sign of involvement in the scene or its sequels. The rope that encircles her creates the dream images through which she skips, weightless and with floating hair. This figure was not created in 1969, for it had already appeared with its accompanying shadow and double in 1931 in Dali's illustration for Nuits partagées, where it enhanced Eluard's love communion in the dream world. In the 1936 painting entitled The Suburb of the Paranoiac-Critical Town, the very same illustration forms one of the panels. This recurring creature establishes not only a conscious link among Dali's works and also with the paranoiac-critical method but also an affinity with one of De Chirico's creations: the girl with the hoop who in Mystery and Melancholy of a Street runs as unconcerned with her surroundings as Dali's Alice.¹²

The etched frontispiece accompanying the introductory poem showing Alice and her shadow appears in an outer space with hills and clouds gathered in the background; a figure seated in the foreground probably alludes to the pilgrim mentioned in the poem. Careful scrutiny establishes a relationship between the floating quality of the hair and the fluid outlines of the landscape; the mysterious force that prolongs the skirt also extends the ground, which recedes dramatically and undermines its tangible qualities, thus setting the stage for the simulacrum or illusory representation. Henceforth Dali bypasses the narrative and the human exchange between characters, while retaining the animals, which, instead of appearing in successive chapters, are simultaneously present at the expense of plot development and narrative time. Dali predicates that from the beginning all creatures try to assert their visibility.

Windows, doors, holes, frames abound, abolishing the distinction between seer and seen and creating a sense of depth. All creatures partake in visions, ready to exhibit their colorful webs, their immanent radiance. By their shapes, their mellow lines, Dali proclaims the mysterious affinity of all elements rather than their individuality. The caterpillar barely differs from a reptile. Toadstool, tea table, and caterpillar become signs that can substitute for one another in various episodes. The toadstool represents the initial incarnation of the tea table. The rabbit, on several occasions, appears embedded in a gardenlike surface; by color scale and fluctuations he simultaneously suggests moving clouds. Elsewhere, delineated by black outlines, he signals the passage from text to image as well as the fluctuations of the dreamscape dominated by spirals and dotted lines. Each plate includes to a certain extent luminous zones where colors melt into each other and dark centers from which explosions erupt. These sum up the dual trend towards concentration or dispersion,¹³ the flux that governs Alice's voyages and visions. Both Carroll's and Tenniel's interpretations of the pool of tears are literal: a girl swimming vigorously against the rising waters. Dali shows stages and manifestations of a solidifying and liquefying process, of concretion and dissolution. The single drop with its alchemical lure belongs to the same phenomenon as the waves of the ocean, which reverberate the movement of the sky. Dali insists not on simple being but on complex becoming, which, once alerted, the viewer may extend. The painter bypasses the very adventure that literature has already fully told.

Having abolished outer time, he retains the essence of sudden shifts and transformations. The repeated presence of butterflies in addition to caterpillars, in fact, the multiplication of butterflies in the latter plates, can be construed as reference to a paradoxical union of diachrony and synchrony. Dali reduces space to surface, eliminating, as he did with time, mimetic representation. In his interpretation of the tea party one of the immediately recognizable scenes, the Surrealist painter introduces one of his soft watches, thus reducing even further, by his own myth, the rigorous and one-directional unfolding of time. However, the presence of soft watches must not be construed as arbitrary or governed by the “hasard objectif”; it must not be construed as a mere repetition of the artist's own obsessive images. It does relate to Carroll's text where the Mad Hatter's persistent and prolonged tea drinking ceremony constitutes a softening or elimination of the rigors and constraint imposed by ordinary time, a shifting toward the dream. Moreover, because the watch face doubles as tabletop, it subverts its normal function. The principle of transformation, which does not seem to affect Alice, is inherent in the wonderland that she creates, but that in the text as well as in Tenniel's illustrations she merely viewed and experienced.

Animated playing cards in Carroll's world point toward the precariousness and limitations of the world of the grown-up. Dali depicts them with a seemingly sharp realism, so that, at first sight, their stereotyped and artificial qualities might appear convincing. Yet Dali perverts any realistic aspect by adding a third dimension to the heart, club, and diamond by transforming the pictures on the cards. The Surrealists created playing cards to display their revolutionary purpose: Freud, Novalis replaced decapitated kings and idols. Dali extends the jack's nose, so that like many of his other characters, for example, Violette Nozière, it needs a crutch. He thus gives sexual dimensions to emblematic figures that for Tenniel represent the shallowness of the grown-up world. Dali's Queen holds close to her obliterated face a flower in a gesture reminiscent of medieval symbolism. The cards constitute the false fronts of two couples of shadowy, equally flat figures, perhaps the final variation on Millet's peasants, who, as already stated, had undergone many a metamorphosis both in Les Chants du Maldoror illustrations and in his Mythe tragique de l'Angélus.¹⁴ In one of their appearances, they assume amphibious features; it is true that an underground and undersea adventure under the startling illumination provided by black sea-urchin constellations had preceded. In the last illustration, corresponding to the chapter entitled “Alice's Evidence,” the viewer faces the Queen of Hearts transformed into a virgin holding another figure in her lap. The playing cards and Dali's parodies of Leonardo and Raphael are fused into a single image. The distorted phantom of the Renaissance painting may even correspond to one of the numerous pictorial transformations of Gala. However, the painter has not altogether overlooked Carroll's text in thus updating these reminiscences of his former paintings for he also evokes Alice awakening in the lap of her sister. All the elements coalesce into a single image: Alice, the card queen, the figures borrowed from earlier paintings, the sharply outlined and colored representation and the phantom. The simulacra stand in apparent contrast with the flower of the Queen of Hearts, now an autonomous untouchable symbol, which, however, is but a copy of mystic sign.

These interpretations come closer to Deleuze than to Empson: “Pure becoming, that which is unlimited, becomes the substance of the simulacrum insofar as it evades the act of the Idea, as it questions both the model and the copy” (p. 9). Deleuze by his denial of Alice's identity, as well as by the rejection of the model in favor of the simulacra, not only speaks of Carroll, but also in a sense of Dali. More than any other critical comment, Dali's own paranoiac-critical method elaborated in La Conquête de l'Irrationnel and Le Mythe tragique de l'Angélus explains some aspects of his illustrations. As Haim Finkelstein points out in his “Dali's Paranoia-Criticism or the Exercise of Freedom,” the paranoiac delirium constitutes in itself a form of interpretation that can function both on the verbal and visual level.¹⁵ The image of Alice, accompanied by her shadow with whom her relationship is forever changing, by combining objective and subjective phenomena, introduces from the beginning the notion of simulacrum. The double image of the playing cards, of a “photographic” copy pinned to the shadowy faceless figures further stresses the functioning of Dali's own myth. The dissolving and solidifying forces of the teardrops indicate that Carroll's text acts as a stimulus for the painter's willfully irrational mental activities. Reality is most dramatically destroyed in the sense suggested by Dali's own words: “to systematize confusion and to contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality”¹⁶ by the constant conversion and reconversion of the same elements from colorful to shadowy appearances, substituting for one another, provoking alternatively corrosive and generating forces.

Although outer time, as we have stated, is abolished, allusions to twilight, which Dali considered so significant in Millet's painting and which he explains at length in his Mythe tragique (“atavismes crépusculaires,” p. 39), are very pronounced in his Alice illustrations. Bright lines and dark zones alluding to constellations and their obliterations appear again and again with new variations. Twilight is not, as in Millet, associated with atmosphere, but with the double images of light so destructive, as in so many other Surrealist works, of reality of the outer scene. The paranoiac-critical method makes visible involuntary thought as exemplified by the erotic shapes of caterpillars, nightbirds, ladders, or reptiles.

We have mentioned that Dali complements the text instead of submitting to it. To a certain extent his everchanging signature, sometimes overshadowed by a big crown, sometimes framed into an emblematic sign, sometimes on the verge of total dispersion, indicates his more or less protruding or evanescent creative ego asserting itself in the presence of the text he illustrates and that he is bound partially to destroy. Thus, the Surrealist artist attempts primarily to integrate the text into his work, written and plastic.

Even if Dali subordinates the literary text to his own theory, theory in the etymological sense of spectacle, even if he dismisses “objective” readings, he nevertheless takes cognizance of important aspects of Carroll's book. With her skipping rope, Alice becomes the generator of autonomous images that obliterate every simplistic order of the everyday world. Subtly the painter conveys that the Victorian author questions the rational, the apparently evident as well as the standard linguistic patterns that obliterate all levels of reality but the most superficial.

Dali's illustrations to Alice in Wonderland are in a sense fairly typical of what most major twentieth-century artists have done to texts. While nineteenth-century artists, even a major figure such as Delacroix, tried graphically to express the writer's intention with a minimum distortion, twentieth-century artists tend to transform the text into a pretext for their own elaborations and, as an indirect way, to penetrate into their own creative universe. Picasso shows even greater independence in this respect than Dali, for, as Horodisch has shown, very few of his illustrations have a recognizable relationship with the text they accompany.¹⁷

Notes

1. Cf. the facsimile edition of the 1864 manuscript (New York: Dover Publications, 1965).

2. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Random House, 1969). Books illustrated by Dali include Don Quixote, Macbeth, The Bible, and Les Chants du Maldoror.

3. “Wonderland Revisited,” Antioch Review (1965), pp. 591-616.

4. Logique du sens (Paris, 1969), p. 18.

5. John Skinner, “Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland,” American Imago (1947), pp. 3-31; Martin Grotjahn, “About the Symbolization of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” American Imago (1947), pp. 32-41; Helene Cixous, “Au sujet de Humpty Dumpty toujours déjà tombé,” Lewis Carroll, Cahier de l'Herne (Paris, 1971), pp. 11-19.

6. “The Child as Swain,” in Some Versions of Pastoral (New York, 1960), p. 258.

7. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (New York, 1960) (includes Tenniel's illustrations) and Harry Levin, “Wonderland Revisited,” p. 599.

8. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (New York, 1952); Henri Parisot, ed. “Lewis Carroll,” Cahiers de l'Herne (Paris, 1971).

9. Cf. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, “Une Case en avant, deux cases en arrière,” Cahiers de l'Herne, pp. 41-50.

10. In Oui (Paris, 1971), p. 22.

11. Dali illustré (Paris: Grands Musées, 1974).

12. Other analogies can be established with Max Ernst's Two Children Frightened by a Nightingale.

13. The terms concentration and dispersion may correspond to Lacan's use of metaphore and metonymie in his discussion of Freud's Traumdeutung. Cf. “L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient,” in Ecrits (Paris, 1966), p. 511.

14. Le Mythe tragique de l'Angélus (Paris, 1963).

15. In XXth Century Literature (February 1975), p. 59-71.

16. “L'Ane Pourri,” Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, No. 1, p. 9.

17. Abraham Horodisch, Picasso as a Book Artist (New York, 1962).