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Dalí takes readers down rabbit hole all his own in ‘Alice’ edition
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CHARLES Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) never met. Yet the two iconoclasts come together for a stunning 150th-anniversary edition of the classic novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Cambridge, is better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, a name he used to write “Alice” and several other works that incorporate paradoxes, distortion of space and time, logic and wordplay.
Dalí, of course, is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, the celebrated surrealist artist. These two names were first brought together when the painter was commissioned to illustrate a 1969 edition of “Alice.”
Princeton University Press recently marked the book’s publication anniversary by pairing the text of the “Eighty-sixth Thousand” Macmillan edition (1897) (generally considered the most authoritative version) with the illustrations of Dalí.
According to Mark Burstein, who wrote an introduction to the new edition, there were good reasons for this pairing.
While the outrageousness of Carroll’s story fell “within a conventional fairy tale (ostensibly for children), the surrealists deliberately sought outrage and provocation in their art and lives and questioned the nature of reality.”
He also believes Carroll’s writings should be considered “precursors and muses to the surrealists.”
This is likely, given that the primary objective of surrealism was to reify the realms of the unconscious, the absurd, and the imaginary. The influence of surrealism soon went far beyond the visual arts and literature, as it embraced music, film, drama, philosophy and popular culture. The 1969 Random House edition contained twelve heliogravures of original gouaches and one signed engraving.
While Dalí is most known for his precise quasi-photorealistic paintings, in his “Alice” illustrations he eschews the characteristic style we associate with him.
As a matter of fact, his hypersaturated pictures do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. At times, they seem to be pastiches of disparate elements culled from the text, while the juxtaposition of so many elements give the landscapes a dreamlike, ethereal, if not childish, impression. Most likely this is exactly the effect the painter sought to achieve.
The recurrent image of a rope-skipping girl can be traced to Dalí’s earlier works, and works by other artists — for instance the girl with a hoop in Giorgio de Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” (1914), or the young female figure in James Whistler’s “Harmony in Yellow and Gold” (1873). The girl jumping rope — clearly Alice — seems to provide a unifying leitmotif to the illustrations. In this enigmatic icon, her arms form part of a circle that is completed by the jumping rope. It is hard to understand that the girl is clad in dress that could only have interfered with actual rope jumping.
Artistic license
Dalí seemed to enjoy considerable artistic license in creating these illustrations. As Burstein observes, “Dalí’s work seems not so much to translate a literary text into another medium as to provide a complementary experience, one in which Alice herself is not really involved and very few characters are depicted.”
By comparisons, the original — and much more well-known — illustrations of John Tenniel (1820-1914) closely follow the text. They also contain numerous features and details that reward the careful observer. In one picture of Humpty seated on a wall, for instance, a cross section of the wall reveals just how precarious the egg’s seat really is.
But if care is required to appreciate the finely wrought images from Tenniel, a degree of imagination is required to arrive at a sympathetic understanding of Dalí’s work. According to Adriana Peliano, founder of the Sociedade Lewis Carroll do Brasil, “Dalí simulated delirium, speculating on the propriety of the uninterrupted becoming of every object upon which he carried out his paranoid activity. Dalí’s counterfeit paranoia ... allowed him to reorder the world according to his inner obsessions.”
This might not be too far-fetched in depicting the mad world of the Wonderland that Alice strolls through.
Art historian Sears Goldman opines: “Unsettling shadows and odd juxtapositions make for sinister and sometimes frightening images. His Mad Tea-Party is not an intelligible image at first glance, but slowly the individual images come together and the scene becomes apparent.” Dalí’s rendering of the tea-party is interspersed with dots and oversized insects, with the insects the only realistically rendered images.
The central item of a pocket watch is conceived as an oversized drooping clock — a throwback to one of Dalí’s most iconic images, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931).
Dalí’s illustrations afford us a glimpse of Wonderland as he sees it, allowing us to better grasp the implications, tropes and symbols the work is pregnant with.
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