Alice's Adventures in the Oral-Literary Continuum (review)

Björn Sundmark. Alice's Adventures in the Oral-Literary Continuum. Lund Studies in English 97. Ed. Marianne Thormählen and Beatrice Warren. Lund, Sweden: Lund UP, 1999.

Alice's Adventures in the Oral-Literary Continuum marks a striking departure from the all-too-common critical interpretation of the Alice books as highly idiosyncratic, even eccentric literary tales, all but removed from oral tradition. Using a fresh and exciting approach, Sundmark clearly lays out his premise, namely, that Lewis Carroll's four stories about Alice--Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Nursery "Alice"--constitute a progression along the oral-literary continuum. That is, these four iterations of Alice's Adventures, originally told orally to Alice Liddell and her sisters, and later written down, expanded and altered, reveal, when looked at sequentially, a clear process of literarization, of the essentially oral becoming the essentially literate and literary.

Feeling strongly that most critical readings of the Alice books have overemphasized their "uniqueness" while dismissing their place within the folk and fairytale tradition, Sundmark provides an important counterbalance with this study. In fact, he suggests that not only the Alice books but the literary fairytale as a whole should be studied in this way, since "it is a genre that seeks its roots in traditional, oral storytelling, yet one that lends itself easily to literary experimentation and innovation" (201). By looking at the Alice books and literary fairytales in general as worthwhile and legitimate subjects of inquiry for specialists in oral formulaic tradition and morphology, Sundmark breaks new ground. His claim that the four Alice books "take up different positions in the continuum, moving from the oral-literary mode of writing in Under Ground towards the literary orality of Nursery" (201), for example, sets up the very real possibility of another, more complete study which would examine the whole corpus of Victorian literary fairy tales, taking into account the whole genre's "oral precedents in folk tradition" (22).

Alice's Adventures, as they are permutated through the four texts, constitute especially valuable subject matter for examining the oral-literary continuum because, as Sundmark writes, "the Alice stories were originally told orally and then written down" (9). Further, written as they were over many years and with many changes in both conception and realization, and with shifts in both aim and audience, these four texts came about during a particularly fortuitous time--"during the early days of the literary folktale when genre conventions were unstable" (9). Being unstable, being pliable, the genre itself, if it could be properly called that, was plastic enough to embrace works as disparate as John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, William Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, George MacDonald's The Light Princess, and Charles Dickens's "The Magic Fishbone," in addition to the widely varying Alice books themselves. Equally important, perhaps, is the fairly late date of the development of the literary fairytale as a genre and the corresponding wealth of biographical material available to scholars seeking to tease out the storytelling origin of many of the tales themselves.

As Sundmark makes clear in his Introduction,

It is high time to extend the scope of such studies to include narratives of a later date, especially works that are known to have been orally conceived or where an oral-literary progression can be traced by comparing different versions of the same tale. The literary fairy tale with its oral precedents in folk tradition invites such an enterprise. (22)

And just as Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and much of Looking-Glass are known to have been composed orally, told at the urging of Alice Liddell and her sisters, other texts, too--Ruskin's and Thackeray's tales mentioned above--were composed for particular children, for particular purposes, even though they became "literary...