Tami ng of books
Curioser and Cur loser
Benny Green
What a beautifully eccentric idea is a book composed entirely of footnotes; just as crazy in Its way as a novel requiring an index, but somehow more difficult to pull off. For the existence of a footnote implies both the existence of some standard text and a reader requiring enlightenment regarding it. The footnote and its older brother, the annotation, are engines of academic scholarship so lamentably misused as to have fallen into thoroughly deserved disrepute among all but specialist stlidents, and are too often mere displays of pretentiousness; Arnold Bennett once asked Eliot if the notes of 'The Waste Land' were meant to be taken seriously, and on being told they were, replied, "Why?"; a very good question. Of contemporary writers, 1 can think of only one, Jan Morris, whose annotations Possess the charm and informality which every annotation should.
. But a whole book of annotations, there's an Id,_ea. I have to say that much as I cherish the thought that such a book exists, and much as I am pleased to own a copy, Baring-Gould's Annoted Sherlock Holmes totally misses the Point, although were it not for Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice, we might never have realised what the point is, which is the enhancement of an already irrestible source of Pleasure. Gardner's Carroll annotations, being the perfect demonstration of the art, raise Points worth considering, but Gardner, an acutely intelligent critic, has already considered them. The most obvious, and the most lrnportant query is, why break the butterfly of C. arroll's fantasy on the wheel of literary interrogation? To which Gardner replies that no joke is funny unless you see the point of it, „which sounds plausible enough. But he must 'hoW that a joke ceases to be one the moment
it has to be explained. The real justification far his reckless and completely successful gamble of a book, is that Gardner appreciates the beauty of butterflies as deeply as anyone, and has not only preserved those beauties but has strained, entirely successfully 1 would say, to illuminate them further. A case in point is the sublime skill as a parodist which Carroll scattered so liberally through the Mice texts. Most readers know this, but Gardner publishes the original texts alongside the Alice versions, showing us that however obsequious the Reverend Dodgson was inclined to be in the august presence of those whom the Victorians mistakenly considered to be his literary betters, his astonishing looking-glass inversion, Lewis Carroll, spared nobody when it came to the more fatuous products of poets and poetasters alike, from the gloriously daft original of 'Speak Roughly to Your Little Boy' to the pietistic model by Southey for 'you are old, Father William' and the mealymouthed invocation to dutiful study by Isaac Watts which drove Carroll to the welcome irreverence of 'How Doti' the Little Crocodile.'
Another vexed question for Carrollians is the extent to which the nature of those ghosts of mathematical and philosophical theory which haunt Wonderland are interesting to literary explorers of the territory. It might, for instance, sound wildly fanciful to compare the Cheshire Cat's speculations on the comparative nature of Sanity ("We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad") with the exchanges in Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates wonders how it might be possible to distinguish dream from reality and madness from sanity; however, as the issue is one with which Carroll is more closely associated than any other English writer of his time, Gardner's annotation is by no means incongruous. Obviously to read the Alice books for the first time in the edition which prints Gardner's annotations in the margin would be disastrous, but as the only readers who pick up book with a title like The Annotated Alice are those already familiar with Carroll's twin masterpieces, the issue is a bogus one. Perhaps the easiest way for each of us to determine the , extent to which Gardner's book is worthy of the bookshelf, or the extent to which the bookshelf is worthy of Gardner's book ("Do cats eat bats; do bats eat cats?") is to measure the extent of his knowledge by attending to the following questions:
1. In which novel does George Eliot duplicate the Looking Glass situation by wondering what would happen if chessmen had passions and intellects? 2. What connection is there between Alice and the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics?
3. Which politician can be seen in Tenniel's illustration of the railway carriage in Looking Glass Insects?
4. What did the Gnat mean by his reference to "Frumenty" in the same chapter? 5. What anagrams of William Ewart Gladstone did Carroll coin? 6, who portrayed the White Knight in Paramount's 1933 movie? 7. "Living backwards," said Alice, "I never heard of such a thing." Which twentieth century American writer based a short story on that idea. What was the story? 8. A writer called Norbert Wiener wrote, "It is impossible to describe , . except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter," Which famous Englishman proved that Life sometimes imitates Art by qualifying to fit the blank? 9. who wrotethat the physicist's description of an elementary particle is a kind. of Jabberwocky; words applied to "something unknown" that is doing "we don't know what?" 10. Who wrote the original of "The Sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might?"
Those readers who can answer less than five of these questions must certainly go and buy a copy of Gardner's The Annotated Alice (Penguin Books 61.10). Those who can answer more
than five on the other hand, may consider themselves well enough versed in Wonderland lore to read Gardner's book without fear of tearing the wings off the butterfly. These are the answers:
I) Felix Holt. 2) Two Chinese-American physicists received the award for investigations in to the nature of anti-matter, which is what Alice was doing when she observed, "Perhaps Looking Glass milk isn't good to drink" 3) Benjamin Disraeli. 4) A wheat pudding. 5) Wilt tear down all images; Wild agitator, means well. 6) Gary Cooper. 7)F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Strange case of Benjamin Button. 8) Bertrand Russell. 9) Sir Arthur Eddington. 10) Thomas Hood.
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