1 English book club 1 Alice's adventures in Wonderland

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: 18th January 2020. We were around 25 participants, the meeting took place on the first floor of the Public Library in Calais (16 rue Pont Lottin), and we started with a presentation by Bruno LEMAITRE about :
- the writer : Lewis CARROLL, and the real Alice LINDEL
- the different re-interpretations of his work "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass".

After that we had a discussion with the participants, mainly about the following subjects :
- the difficulties to translate (in French or other languages) the many puns and references to the English culture that can be found in the books,with the unavoidable conclusion that a part of the savior of a book is always lost in translation (and then how important it is to talk  the language to fully appreciate the work)
- the ambiguous relationship between the writer and his inspirer, especially in relation to the pictures taken by Lewis CARROLL in the Victorian fashion of lascivious poses for children, which look nowadays inappropriate because too suggestive. Were they in a paedophile relationship?
- Is this book really suitable for children, given its uneasing and disturbing undertone? And the answer is that unsually we offer to the children a simplified version of it, focusing on the imagination side, but when they read the original work as adults they find more in it that they can relate to.

And we ended up with a merry tea party, even though we werre missing a MadHatter.

The next meeting is on saturday the 15th of February, 10am to 12, same place (public library 16 rue Pont Lottin), on the ground floor, and we'll talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Hi everyone ! 
Thank you again for this initiative. Like all masterpieces "Alice in Wonderland can be understood on different levels". The story is wonderful and very skillfully written. The puns, the imagination of the author who takes us into that fantastic country make us dream. I read it when I was a kid and I remember that it made me uncomfortable. Now I wonder why? The depth-psychologically analysis of "Alice in the wonderland" reveals some secrets
        1st secret Lewis Caroll 's impaired eye -sight 

wikipedia a écrit:Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), also known as Todd's syndrome or dysmetropsia, is a neuropsychological condition that distorts perception. People may experience distortions in visual perception of objects such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) away than they actually are. Size distortion may occur in other sensory modalities as well.

     2nd secret was Lewis caroll a pedophile ?
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/was-lewis-carroll-a-pedophile-his-photographs-suggest-so-237222

Will self a écrit:I think, [Carroll] was a heavily repressed pedophile, without doubt. It’s a problem, isn’t it, when somebody writes a great book but they’re not a great person

They found a photo of a pubescent girl called Lorina Liddell in the nude in a full-frontal pose, I am shocked. I agree that morality was different in victorian times (in poor families children started to work at the age of 4 and 5 and in rich families there was an overwhelming sense of boredome and  a constant prodding to be proper and polite) children were considered as objects at that time ( so were the women so fortunately Alice is a female character) but is it enough to give an excuse to Lewis Caroll? 

    3rd Secret

Alice is travelling in her unconscious http://www.santacruzpsychologist.com/blog/2012/the-rabbit-hole-a-womans-journey-into-the-unconscious/
1According to Jung

Alice is confronted by plenty of dangers, but she ultimately finds “the right Alice,” and opportunities for the development of her personality.

Alice is surrounded by weird creatures (The adults) and she is the only sensible one. I have the feeling that keeping our chidren's eyes all along our life is very important. For me Alice is a child and also a female who comes across a lot of trials and overcomes them. I find it very good ! 

2 According to Freud
The main theme of the screenplay is infantile sexual curiosity, here declined to the feminine.
https://fairytalesandfreud.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/finding-wonderland-psychoanalysis-in-alice-in-wonderland/ 

Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole could be a route to the unconscious, particularly when we bear in mind that she seems to be dreaming throughout the story. The tunnel could also be a phallic symbol of penetration.More psychosexual imagery emerges when Alice lands – the line up of doors with their locks and keyholes, and the curtain, symbolic of clothing, which Alice must move out of the way, are all potentially telling of the author’s mindset.‘Every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, rather, he arranges the things of his world in a new way,’ Freud.

4th secret 
The Quantum Cheshire Cat https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/pop/the_quantum_cheshire_cat/
The Cheshire cat can help us to understand the quantum nature of the universe doesn't it ?

Can you have a ring without a bell? A bark without its dog? In the weird quantum world you can. The Quantum Cheshire Cat Experiment, named after the mischievously grinning feline Alice encounters in Wonderland, has turned from theory to reality the remarkable feat of separating particles from their properties. Physicists were able to separate neutrons from their spins, like the Cheshire cat and its grin, and in doing so further question our understanding of the world around us. We are taught that the universe is made up of mana different particles - light of photons, atoms of electrons and protons and neutrons - and that these all have specific properties such as charge and spin. The idea that somehow these particles could exist without their properties, and ever stranger that these properties could exist without their particles, is a notion that goes against our intuition though one that is permitted by quantum theory.

5th secret
Does Alice(in her Journey into the quantum universe )teach us something about our destiny as humans ? Isn't the story happening underneath? In a dream, in another life, life after life?
Some researchers think humans live in two worlds because our nature, according to them, is double! In the quantum world particles are also waves which can be found simultaneously in two places, or pass through obstacles that one would think impassable. Hence that novel


When we read the testimonies of those who have experienced NDE (Near Death Experience) we find coincidences in the sensations they feel with what happens in the infinitely small : crossing walls, finding themselves everywhere and in one place simultaneously, the sensation that time no longer exists. It looks strangely similar to the waves/particles duality
doesn’t it ?

That's a very detailled point of view ! Thank you for all the references, S. C.