Nonsense As Reality

Abstract

Nonsense As Reality K. Narayan Kutty (bio) Poems of Lewis Carroll, selected by Myra Cohn Livingston. New York: Thomas Crowell Company, 1973. $4.95. Carroll's poetry may be too sophisticated and witty to appeal to very young children. The children he knew best and adored belonged to the 8-11 age group. But not all children of this group will appreciate Carroll's riddles, puzzles, parodies, acrostics, and serious verse. This should not disturb anyone. After all, how many adults read Shakespeare? The children Carroll wrote for, like the adults Pope and Johnson wrote for, had cultivated tastes. For such children, whose number is not alarmingly large, thanks to the attention poetry receives in American schools, Myra Cohn Livingston's selections from Carroll is a book of unexpected delights. She offers them the best of Carroll's poetry: the poems of the Alice books, of Sylvie and Bruno, of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, The Hunting of the Snark, and many more. The original illustrations of John Tenniel, Harry Furniss, Henry Holiday, Arthur B. Frost, and Carroll himself reproduced in the book enhance its value. The book also has an informative introduction and useful notes on the poems. The omission of Phantasmagoria, which has much to offer young readers and adults, is a lamentable one. Carroll knew too much about life to limit the appeal of his works only to children. What W. H. Auden said, with Alice in mind, that "there are no good books which are only for children," may be said about all Carroll's major works. There is already encyclopaedic evidence for the adult world's fascination with Carroll's works. One particularly appealing feature of his career as a writer is his life-long interest in nonsense as a literary medium. Reading Carroll and about Carroll over a period of time, one comes to the conclusion that he seems to have resorted to nonsense not only because he enjoyed doing so but also because he found it to be the most appropriate medium for his version of reality. His response to reality seems to have been like Alice's response to the "Jabberwocky." Alice thought that the poem filled her mind with ideas but she could not say what they were. It is possible that it is the perception of reality as unknowable that inspired Carroll to play games with it in his novels and [End Page 286] poems. Look at The Hunting of the Snark, for instance. Hunting for the snark is like searching for something unknowable. What is searched for is named arbitrarily, and what is found is not a snark but a boojum. And what a boojum is nobody knows. Consider "The Gardener's Song" in Sylvie and Bruno. The gardener is unable to see things right; nothing appears as it is to him. But this elusiveness of reality did not reduce Carroll to mystic silence. He decided to play games with it. The unknowability of reality had intriguing artistic possibilities for Carroll. All this is nothing new now but was a hundred years ago, when Beckett, Nabokov, Borges, and Barthelme had not been born. [End Page 287] K. Narayan Kutty Narayan Kutty teaches children's literature and theater at Eastern Connecticut State College in Willimantic, Connecticut. A specialist in modern British literature, he has written essays for a forthcoming critical anthology of children's literature to be published by David McKay Company. Copyright © 1976 Francelia Butler