Surreal: illustrating nonsense

Surreal: illustrating nonsense

My visual essay examines the illustration of nonsense: Lewis Carroll's own original illustrations for Alice and John Tenniel's adaptations of those from the 1860s, Mary Blair's adaptations for the 1951 Disney film, and selected works of Rene Magritte in the 1920s and 30s.

The soundtrack is Fantastic Dance #1 by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The two-minute Quicktime movie I made is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/lpd/2surreal.mov

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Surreal: illustrating nonsense

The yin-yang symbol symbol is an emblem of the Self. The dualities are not separate and distinct and forever warring; the opposites co-exist in shifting equilibrium, they live within one another, moving toward the balance of individuation which Jung espoused, the Self which is not the little self of the singular ego, but the large Self of the cosmic Soul. Myth and fairy tale examine this movement toward wholeness and a large part is played by shape-shifting: the fantastic, the ridiculous, the frightening. Lewis Carroll brought all this forward into the written and published children’s story set in the present day.

The Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century appears a natural bridge between the Alice of 1865 and the Alice of the 1951 movie. Lewis Carroll’s delight in nonsense and wordplay resurfaced in the Surrealists with their insistence on play and dream, the unconscious and the irrational, their transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. And when Mary Blair in her turn approached the Alice material for Walt Disney in 1950, she melded the absurdities of the original text and illustrations with the hallucinatory colors and forms of the Surrealists.

Carroll had a strong sense of how he wanted Alice illustrated; his own original drawings are both charming and grotesque and Tenniel’s subsequent translations are faithfully enhancing. I smiled at the uncanny resemblance of the White Knight to Tenniel himself and smiled again when I came across the photograph of Richard Burton as the Knight (in the 1983 PBS version, the year before his death, in which Burton’s daughter played Alice). From there it is not so far a distance to seeing the Knight again in the sly black and white reflective portrait of Rene Magritte in front of his own painting.

In comparing the Carroll drawings with the Tenniel engravings, one sees the tenderness with which Tenniel’s experience and natural talents amplify the originals. Alice confined within the bedroom was a favorite of mine as a child, illustrating as it does the constrictions and restrictions of childhood, and when I later came across Magritte’s paintings of the rose and the apple similarly confined, I was dumbfounded -- and thrilled, particularly because the rose and the apple are so recurrent in his work, as are the crescent moon, the mirror, the window (curtained like a stage), the bowler hat, the heads: empty or transformed, the blue sky with cottony clouds, the doubling, the unexpected emptiness.

The Cheshire Cat is one of Mary Blair’s most enduring gifts of illustration: what is he? where is he? who is he? this embodiment of playful, biting, whirling teasing and then the slow unraveling and dissolving into a crescent moon of grinning teeth.

In Blair’s work on the Tea Party, the Croquet Party, and the Walrus and the Carpenter, one sees again that she, like the Surrealists, is fearless and hilarious in confronting the silly, the dangerous and the macabre. Her oysters dance happily, without feet, toward their doom; a half-cup of tea both defies and obeys the laws of physics; flamingos and hedgehogs become human tools -- animals seriously under the subjugation of their human masters.

Paradox and ambiguity are met head-on in these works; in fact they are chief among the invited guests. The relations of opposites -- up/down, before/after, above/below, past/future, good/evil -- are whirled and twirled and looked at from any and every angle. And always with the potential laugh, though the subject may be grim and the humor gallows. What budding vegetarian has not seen an eye staring back from a slab of ham? What young woman in love has not seen the skeleton beneath her own flesh and her lover’s? As Magritte said, “I’m sure even Hegel enjoyed his holidays.”

Our vision, into ourselves and onto the world, is a false, a suspect, mirror/window. Our rationality is undercut by our irrationality -- we ignore that at our own, and our neighbor’s, peril. We need to remain aware that our creations are creations -- this is one painting of a pipe, this is one description of a reality -- and skeptical and open-minded and balanced enough to laugh heartily and often.



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