![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiLewis Carroll as/and the Author-Function
Will's subtitle is "Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture" and it is that figure, rather than Alice herself, whose function in (what is ostensibly) popular culture the book addresses in the early chapters. The book deals with, then, what in this journal I call (drawing on Foucault's essay "What is an Author?") an "author function"--the constructed image of an author held by readers. There is something fascinating about this approach, talking about the different ways we socially construct our perception of an author, but I'm not sure Carroll is the best choice for it. The book gets mired in the accusations of pedophilia lodged against Carroll, and as a result the more interesting aspects of the text and its reception end up lost.
Taking the "Pop!" out of Popular Culture
What makes Will's approach particularly odd is that when one gets down to it, the author function "Lewis Carroll" doesn't have all that much of a role to play in popular culture. Indeed, it is hard to think of many non-contemporary authors who do. Shakespeare is of course the clear exception here--although even then we don't have very much to say about him beyond acknowledging his genius (the "Bardolatry" much berated by Shaw and others).
The soi-disant artifacts of "popular culture" to which Will turns in order to discuss the author-function "Lewis Carroll" thus include several biographies, a database search of British journalism (the results being mostly reviews of relevant books and plays), and other scholarly and non-scholarly texts. To argue whether such works can "really" constitute popular culture would be, as the Red Queen says, about as sensible as a dictionary (which is to say not very), but it is worth noting that Will constructs popular culture much more broadly than I had expected, and that the book as a whole reads much more like a review of academic literature than a typical work in media studies. This is true, although to a lesser degree, even in the later chapters, in which Will loosens his focus on Carroll enough to look at some texts which fall more comfortably under the normal rubric of popular culture, such as movie adaptations, published continuations, Batman comics, the American McGee Alice game, and Disneyland Paris.
Theory and Agenda
Perhaps surprisingly given its innovative focus, the book isn't very theoretical, although I suppose that isn't really a criticism as such. I probably would have enjoyed the book more if it were more theoretical, if it mentioned Foucault and/or Derrida every other paragraph, but it's hard to claim that Will's project really demands such a treatment, as he seems to be much more interested in the specific details, the facts, surrounding the construction of this particular author-function than he is in the theoretically considerations which may be raised by his methodology. This makes him temperamentally radically different than myself (who could care less about the facts, really) but as he manges to relate his project to his reader in fairly clear and easily understandable terms, berating the book for not doing something it never sought out to do and would no doubt make it less marketable besides seems to be making a pretty silly criticism when all is said and done.
Ironically, where a more theoretical framework might have come in handy is when he undergoes the less-theoretically-interesting task of interrogating the character-function of the eternal Alice (although he rarely does so without a good deal of his attention still affixed to Carroll, even if only implicitly). Here, the wealth of information threatens to overwhelm, and it is perhaps understandable that Will continues to cite mainly academic sources, and when Will does undergo a quasi-ethnographic approach, as in the final two chapters, or a close reading of texts, as in his readings of several Alice continuations or of several Alice movie adaptations, it seems fairly random and haphazard.
While one does get a rough sense of the narrative Will sees as being formed by the sequence of information he lays before the reader, and an even rougher sense of the agenda that shapes that narrative, it would perhaps be easier if he stepped in to provide his own interpretation more often. I love Alice (and the Alice books) deeply, but I'm unsure what if anything I'm supposed to take away from the fact that her mythos has been used to sell beer--or even why I should particularly care. The many psychoanalytic readings of Alice are put forth to us with neither noticeable skepticism nor credulity.
The Mode of Analysis
Will's book further suffers, in my opinion, from a conflation of darker readings of Alice with psychosexual ones and with accusations of pedophilia. The Alice books certainly have their darker moments, such as when Humpty Dumpty mentions to the seven-and-a-half-years-old Alice of Looking Glass that she could have stopped ageing at seven if only she had had suitable assistance, but this is not to construct the books as being about sex or to construct Carroll as a pedophile. All three readings can of course coexist in a reading of Alice as a dark novel about sex written by a pedophile, but they are just as able to exist independently. By seeming to lock interpretations of Alice into a false binary in which they are either light and fluffy readings of the text as healthy nonsense, or else darker readings of it as the sexualized repressions of a pedophile, Will radically and lamentably eliminates much of the books' richness and thickness.
Will reads the readers of Alice in such a way as to emphasize the relation of a) their thoughts on Carroll's relationship to Alice Liddell, to b) their construction of the meaning of the text. He does this by teasing out the moments when the critics refer (sometimes, seemingly, simply en passant) to the biographical details of Carroll's life. Will's analytic lens isn't nearly as noticeable as that of the analysts he ostensibly analyzes, however; indeed, sometimes his project seems positively Foucauldian in its seeming attempt to perform the self-defeating task of providing an objective history of social construction. (Will does explicitly recognize, it should be noted, that the narrative he provides will be shaped by his agenda--and his work is better referenced than Foucault's.)
A similar hermeneutic is at work when he considers fictional appropriations of the Alice mythos, as in this example when he discusses the figure of the Mad Hatter from the Batman comics:
Fanfiction and Fandom
Will explicitly recognizes:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide story as a professionally published work. (Although some of the elements Will sees as present in both fanfiction and the published novels, such as the mimicking of Carroll's stories, are more particular to yuletide than to fanfiction in general. Of course, Will neglects to discuss online Alice fanfic, an omission which is somewhat conspicuous in its absence as I am sure that such exists. (And if not, I'm sure you could get someone to write it.)
Also relevant to the ongoing conversation, especially as the Kristina Busse/Cornel Sandvossfandebate has just been posted last week, is Will's attempt to separate fans from non-fans, with the latter still assumed to have read and enjoyed the books, viewed a cinematic adaptation, and read some relevant journalism. As such, it is in some ways analagous to the distinction that some have tried to make--and others have tried to collapse--between supposed "water-cooler" fans and fen in fandom.
Given all this, it is interesting that there is no actual analysis of user-generated content in the book. There's a couple mentions, mostly to erotic websites, but for an examination of the function of Alice and Carroll in the discourse of popular culture, certainly a more bottom-up approach than the one employed by Will would be appropriate. The chapter called "Fans" interviews five high-ranking members of the Lewis Carroll Society.
Gender and Queerness
The book pays no attention that I could detect to any issues of gender or heteronormativity. Of the five members of the LCS members, only one is female, but Will makes no comment on this fact beyond reporting it. (Note also that no mention of homosexuality is made in Will's definition of "slash" quoted above.)
It's difficult to navigate such a complaint, especially considering the accusation of feminist entitlement I've seen made onfandebate more than once that we're simply upset that people are studying different types of fans than the ones we're interested in. The point isn't that Will has missed the chance to go to any of several places that I can think of using queer and feminist lenses (how queer is Alice/Carroll and how can we queer it further?), but that he doesn't use such lenses, or even mention gender or queerness at all, is telling.
Things What I Liked
It's undeniable that this review has been profoundly influenced by my frustration atfandebate. While everything I write is intellectually honest--every criticisam I make is in response to what I see as a real flaw--I have perhaps been especially vigilant in my search for flaws. Thus I want to take time to point out what I particularly liked about Will's book. When Will deigns to analyze specific texts--the Alice continuations, the American McGee game, Disneyaland Paris--these analyses are often excellent. Indeed, his chapter on Alice movie adaptations is uncharacteristically intelligent--he goes so far as to quote Barthes, even--and the most intelligent writing I've seen on the subject. It's only the bigger picture that the book fails to adequately provide.
Will's subtitle is "Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture" and it is that figure, rather than Alice herself, whose function in (what is ostensibly) popular culture the book addresses in the early chapters. The book deals with, then, what in this journal I call (drawing on Foucault's essay "What is an Author?") an "author function"--the constructed image of an author held by readers. There is something fascinating about this approach, talking about the different ways we socially construct our perception of an author, but I'm not sure Carroll is the best choice for it. The book gets mired in the accusations of pedophilia lodged against Carroll, and as a result the more interesting aspects of the text and its reception end up lost.
Taking the "Pop!" out of Popular Culture
What makes Will's approach particularly odd is that when one gets down to it, the author function "Lewis Carroll" doesn't have all that much of a role to play in popular culture. Indeed, it is hard to think of many non-contemporary authors who do. Shakespeare is of course the clear exception here--although even then we don't have very much to say about him beyond acknowledging his genius (the "Bardolatry" much berated by Shaw and others).
The soi-disant artifacts of "popular culture" to which Will turns in order to discuss the author-function "Lewis Carroll" thus include several biographies, a database search of British journalism (the results being mostly reviews of relevant books and plays), and other scholarly and non-scholarly texts. To argue whether such works can "really" constitute popular culture would be, as the Red Queen says, about as sensible as a dictionary (which is to say not very), but it is worth noting that Will constructs popular culture much more broadly than I had expected, and that the book as a whole reads much more like a review of academic literature than a typical work in media studies. This is true, although to a lesser degree, even in the later chapters, in which Will loosens his focus on Carroll enough to look at some texts which fall more comfortably under the normal rubric of popular culture, such as movie adaptations, published continuations, Batman comics, the American McGee Alice game, and Disneyland Paris.
Theory and Agenda
Perhaps surprisingly given its innovative focus, the book isn't very theoretical, although I suppose that isn't really a criticism as such. I probably would have enjoyed the book more if it were more theoretical, if it mentioned Foucault and/or Derrida every other paragraph, but it's hard to claim that Will's project really demands such a treatment, as he seems to be much more interested in the specific details, the facts, surrounding the construction of this particular author-function than he is in the theoretically considerations which may be raised by his methodology. This makes him temperamentally radically different than myself (who could care less about the facts, really) but as he manges to relate his project to his reader in fairly clear and easily understandable terms, berating the book for not doing something it never sought out to do and would no doubt make it less marketable besides seems to be making a pretty silly criticism when all is said and done.
Ironically, where a more theoretical framework might have come in handy is when he undergoes the less-theoretically-interesting task of interrogating the character-function of the eternal Alice (although he rarely does so without a good deal of his attention still affixed to Carroll, even if only implicitly). Here, the wealth of information threatens to overwhelm, and it is perhaps understandable that Will continues to cite mainly academic sources, and when Will does undergo a quasi-ethnographic approach, as in the final two chapters, or a close reading of texts, as in his readings of several Alice continuations or of several Alice movie adaptations, it seems fairly random and haphazard.
While one does get a rough sense of the narrative Will sees as being formed by the sequence of information he lays before the reader, and an even rougher sense of the agenda that shapes that narrative, it would perhaps be easier if he stepped in to provide his own interpretation more often. I love Alice (and the Alice books) deeply, but I'm unsure what if anything I'm supposed to take away from the fact that her mythos has been used to sell beer--or even why I should particularly care. The many psychoanalytic readings of Alice are put forth to us with neither noticeable skepticism nor credulity.
The Mode of Analysis
Will's book further suffers, in my opinion, from a conflation of darker readings of Alice with psychosexual ones and with accusations of pedophilia. The Alice books certainly have their darker moments, such as when Humpty Dumpty mentions to the seven-and-a-half-years-old Alice of Looking Glass that she could have stopped ageing at seven if only she had had suitable assistance, but this is not to construct the books as being about sex or to construct Carroll as a pedophile. All three readings can of course coexist in a reading of Alice as a dark novel about sex written by a pedophile, but they are just as able to exist independently. By seeming to lock interpretations of Alice into a false binary in which they are either light and fluffy readings of the text as healthy nonsense, or else darker readings of it as the sexualized repressions of a pedophile, Will radically and lamentably eliminates much of the books' richness and thickness.
Will reads the readers of Alice in such a way as to emphasize the relation of a) their thoughts on Carroll's relationship to Alice Liddell, to b) their construction of the meaning of the text. He does this by teasing out the moments when the critics refer (sometimes, seemingly, simply en passant) to the biographical details of Carroll's life. Will's analytic lens isn't nearly as noticeable as that of the analysts he ostensibly analyzes, however; indeed, sometimes his project seems positively Foucauldian in its seeming attempt to perform the self-defeating task of providing an objective history of social construction. (Will does explicitly recognize, it should be noted, that the narrative he provides will be shaped by his agenda--and his work is better referenced than Foucault's.)
A similar hermeneutic is at work when he considers fictional appropriations of the Alice mythos, as in this example when he discusses the figure of the Mad Hatter from the Batman comics:
There is also [in Grant Morission's Arkham Asylum] a knowing, nudge-nudge awareness of rhe Carroll-as-paedophile rumour, and an understanding that readers will recognize the reference: the Hatter is clearly drawing his love-gate affair with "little blonde girls" from a reading of the Alice books as disguised expression of obsession, ad from the popular perception of the Carroll-Alice Liddell relationship as romantic or quasi-sexual.Yes, of course that's what the Mad Hatter has to be doing. Clearly.
Fanfiction and Fandom
Will explicitly recognizes:
I am approaching Through The Needle's Eye and the other two novels in this study much as I have previously examined Internet-based fanfiction. This comparison may meet some resistance from those who see published novels as considerably superior to stories posted on a Web site--particularly those stories within the genre of "slash fiction", which typically explore sexual or romantic relationships between pop cuilture characters. Of course, a book like Still She Haunts Me, imagining Carrol and Alioce's relationship, written by Katie Roiphe and published by an imprint of Holden Headline, does not hold the same cultural status as "Secrets of the Heart", imaging Qui-Gon Jinn and Mace Windu's relationship`, written by Anastasia and published on the Star Wars fan site Master and Apprentice. I wouldn't seek toa rgue that these particular stories have identical literary merit, although I do believe that we shouldn't assume professionally published novels are by any means "better: than online fiction; it would be easy to give examples from both ends of the cultural hierarchy that contradict this idea. However, I think the three Alice novels I am examining here have a great deal in common with the fan fiction I have encountered; on a formal level, in their relationship with the "official" texts of Alice and Carroll, and in the dynamic they build between familiar accepted elements of the mythos and invented, imagined additions that still have to feel "right".He is wise to make this acknowledgement, of course--the analysis he goes on to perform could just as easily describe someone's
yuletide story as a professionally published work. (Although some of the elements Will sees as present in both fanfiction and the published novels, such as the mimicking of Carroll's stories, are more particular to yuletide than to fanfiction in general. Of course, Will neglects to discuss online Alice fanfic, an omission which is somewhat conspicuous in its absence as I am sure that such exists. (And if not, I'm sure you could get someone to write it.)Also relevant to the ongoing conversation, especially as the Kristina Busse/Cornel Sandvoss
fandebate has just been posted last week, is Will's attempt to separate fans from non-fans, with the latter still assumed to have read and enjoyed the books, viewed a cinematic adaptation, and read some relevant journalism. As such, it is in some ways analagous to the distinction that some have tried to make--and others have tried to collapse--between supposed "water-cooler" fans and fen in fandom.Given all this, it is interesting that there is no actual analysis of user-generated content in the book. There's a couple mentions, mostly to erotic websites, but for an examination of the function of Alice and Carroll in the discourse of popular culture, certainly a more bottom-up approach than the one employed by Will would be appropriate. The chapter called "Fans" interviews five high-ranking members of the Lewis Carroll Society.
Gender and Queerness
The book pays no attention that I could detect to any issues of gender or heteronormativity. Of the five members of the LCS members, only one is female, but Will makes no comment on this fact beyond reporting it. (Note also that no mention of homosexuality is made in Will's definition of "slash" quoted above.)
It's difficult to navigate such a complaint, especially considering the accusation of feminist entitlement I've seen made on
fandebate more than once that we're simply upset that people are studying different types of fans than the ones we're interested in. The point isn't that Will has missed the chance to go to any of several places that I can think of using queer and feminist lenses (how queer is Alice/Carroll and how can we queer it further?), but that he doesn't use such lenses, or even mention gender or queerness at all, is telling.Things What I Liked
It's undeniable that this review has been profoundly influenced by my frustration at
fandebate. While everything I write is intellectually honest--every criticisam I make is in response to what I see as a real flaw--I have perhaps been especially vigilant in my search for flaws. Thus I want to take time to point out what I particularly liked about Will's book. When Will deigns to analyze specific texts--the Alice continuations, the American McGee game, Disneyaland Paris--these analyses are often excellent. Indeed, his chapter on Alice movie adaptations is uncharacteristically intelligent--he goes so far as to quote Barthes, even--and the most intelligent writing I've seen on the subject. It's only the bigger picture that the book fails to adequately provide.