Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an Oxford mathematician and logician, invented a world and a language that have taken on an iconic value in the childhood and adult imagination, thanks to the union of creativity, imagination, play, satire, nonsense and the mixture of prose and poetry.
Outside of traditional schemes and models, Carroll has produced extremely complex works from a formal point of view, so much so that they can be read and interpreted at different levels. On the one hand, the adventure is taken to its extremes, with the description of a dreamlike journey within a world without rules, the “Wonderland”, on the other the reflection on language is central.
“What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”: this is the question that opens Alice’s adventures which crosses over with the question that the protagonist continually asks herself in front of the hall doors at the end of the underground tunnel into which she fell to follow the White Rabbit: Which way, which way, continually prey to that disorientation so deeply rooted in the contemporary world.
Wonderland, like the contemporary world, is a labyrinth where there is no predefined path and the research theme develops through travel, often aimed at finding something, in many cases oneself, through a series of rites of passage made through wonderful adventures lived in a fantasy world.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, great read for a Happy Easter!