First Preamble: Through the Looking Glass is not (I believe) up to the standard of the original so let us put that aside for the moment.
Second Preamble: Please debate, counter with what you believe to be the best work of literature, or why you believe this one to not qualify. I post here for discussion and fun, not to persuade others of my viewpoint. We all have a long standing relationship with books and no two minute read will fundamentally change our perceptions, nor am I so arrogant to assume that is my place to do so.
With the exception of Alice, every other book serves an ulterior purpose. They either function as political/social commentary like is the case with Dickens, overview the historical record of a nation/people like Tolstoy, debate judicial concepts like Dostoyevsky, mourn historic wrongs like Eli Weasel, establish myths and origins like Virgil, function as geographic/cultural encyclopedia like Homer, or they provide a proverbial gut punch like Twain.
None have a fundamental grasp on language or prose. Prose is the medium, not just a tool used to speculate on some external issue.
Alice is the only book to focus primarily on language, not messaging or theme. It applies standard sentence structures and reconfigures the semantics to produce a paradox. Everything is taken from our conceptual world yet nothing is allegorical to our reality.
It is not some boring escapism like Tolkien or Lewis who dream of a better world, nor is it the worrisome nightmares of Huxley who imagines a worse one. It is an unpretentious examination of narrative structure while utilizing the predetermined physics of our definitive nouns.
Even the so called children's classics are thinly veiled adult narratives using the aesthetic of the adolescent. Shrek, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, etc. are books with an adult psychology, and by consequence are absorbed by the same situational approach to narrative and theme that require some greater message.
Historical tales like Beowulf or Snow White are oratory narratives, practical warning that use characters and plot as a device.
Alice doesn't use its story as a device, it is language at its most fundamental form. Writers should learn to love prose not for what it can achieve, but for what it is. Alice is the standard for all books to be assessed for it does not treat the medium like a hurdle to be overcome, but something with value in of itself. Other classics certainly reach such heights, but that comes accidently and is ephemeral in nature
Alice brings out these heights to the forefront and reveals them to the naked eye, that is why in my opinion Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the default of what great literature is at its very core underneath the layers of psychological and philosophical analysis.
by butterweedstrover
11 Comments
You might think too much. Or read too much. Or read too much into readings n such.
Clearly you’ve never read Treasure Island.
Just the fact that you called books that provide escapism boring puts us on two separate planes. I thoroughly enjoy fantasy for that exact reason. And, in your explanation as to why Alice is superior, aren’t you just stating that you enjoy the words for words sake? Wouldn’t that be, in itself, a form of escapism for you as the reader? And if every single book followed the same concept, god would the world of literature be bland.
Objectively? Are you 12 years old or something?
It’s your opinion man, but some counters:
Best Style: Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau — truly a book that serves no other purpose than that of style itself, better than Alice in this regard, I’d say so.
Best Style in English: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — often brought up as being pure style, it is decidedly more than that. Does it have a better style than Alice, I can’t say for certain, but it does in my opinion.
Best Work of Literature “by a great many degrees”: The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin— Style, Plot, Characterization, Creativity, and Philosophy each to a level that a very few number of books reach even one of these five elements to that level.
1. You don’t seem to know the definition of “objectively.”
2. Your entire argument is based on the premise that literature should serve no purpose beyond art for art’s sake. That’s not a premise that most people would accept, so your entire argument is meaningless for anyone who doesn’t share your starting premise.
3. You spend most of your time insulting other works, rather than actually making your case.
Second book is as important as first
This may be one of the least humble opinions I have encountered here.
> Through the Looking Glass is not (I believe) up to the standard of the original so let us put that aside for the moment.
I wholeheartedly disagree, both for the charm of the story and for the themes therein, not to mention the way Carroll plays with language in this book as well, but if you want to focus on *Alice* that’s not a problem.
I find it a little insulting to the authors you mentioned to suggest they don’t have a proper grasp of prose as a medium. Some of the authors you mention wrote in languages I do not understand, but Dickens certainly knew his way around a sentence. Read, for example, the first five or so paragraphs of *Bleak House* (too long to reproduce in this comment so please find a link [here](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#c1)), and tell me with a straight face that Dickens didn’t have a fundamental understanding of language and prose. The megalosaurus, not the only known large dinosaur at the time, but the one that *sounds* biggest; the elephantine lizard juxtaposed against the mundane Holborn Hill; the infectious ill temper; mourning for the death of the sun; the mud accumulating at compound interest… The mixture of fantasy and boring, everyday reality raises the scene above our earthly experiences but remains depressingly familiar to anyone whose experienced a wet British autumn.
I think it’s also a little disingenuous to suggest language was Carroll’s only theme. I’m of the opinion that the *Alice* books are about growing up, and some of the ways Carroll uses language is just one part of that theme. The various characters play with the rules of language *and* the rules of society, and it all becomes a confusing game for poor Alice, just like all the rules seem to change when you enter the adult world. Alice’s repeatedly changing size is also reflective of this; during adolescence, most of us experience a transitionary period during which we’re sometimes expected to behave as adults and sometimes as children, moreso in the victorian era before the cultural concept of a teenager arose. Alice is constantly being told what to do by some character or another, rarely do these instructions make any sense, and yet she is spoken to as though she should already know, again, a common experience during adolescence, and particularly during the far stricter and more structured victorian era.
> We all have a long standing relationship with books and no two minute read will fundamentally change our perceptions
That is true (although you might want to loosen up on the hyperbole in future if you want to have some influence), and with that in mind, I recommend *The Annotated Alice* by Martin Gardner, at least the 1999 *Definitive Edition* or ideally the 2015 *150th Anniversary* edition if you can afford it.
Edited language for better comprehension.
I disagree with you on multiple degrees.
First of all the idea that one could take something that is a part of something so broad as literature and call it objectively the best of it. One can do that, as long as you give some means to measure it by. “By a certain measure Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (which I shall refer to as Alice from now on) is objectively the best work of literature there is”, is a statement one might be able to make, at least if the measure is something one can objectively use. However that doesn’t make it objectively the best overall. Someone else could measure the best work of literature in another way. I could, to borrow an example of Papa Burch, believe that a work is better the closer it brings me to the grave. In that case The Lord of the Rings would probably be a better work due to its length.
But that isn’t really fair, after all you say it’s the best by a great many degrees. Reading your post you seem to mean it is far ahead of any competitor, but another way of reading it would be “it’s the best in many ways”. Ambiguity in language is indeed fun, if nothing else I think we can agree to that. In this case how many ways does one need to make many ways. It’s debatable, but I’d say it’s fair to say the answer to that question is at the very least more than one. So how many ways do you show us? One. You postulate that Alice is the best piece of literature because it uses prose beautifully, not for the sake of story or a message but for the sake of using prose, that it shows language in its most fundamental form. Everything you say around that is either to show why that makes it a measure of greatness, or why other books don’t hold up to this measure. So my first point stands. It’s impossible to say that a piece of literature is objectively the best work of literature by a great many degrees, unless you use objectively subjectively, which in modern English seems to be possible, speaking descriptively, though it does not seem to be the way you use the word here.
So let’s look at your axiom of what makes Alice the best work of literature. As I said, this is subjective, but I will show why I disagree with it. If we agree that the core of literature is the prose itself, then I believe it nonsensical to state that Alice is the best because it’s the only work (that you know of) that has only that core and nothing else. If one were to look at what is the best, should you not look at what core is the best, at which piece excels most at prose and language? So what if it has other things around it, so what if it is trying to say something other than ‘look language!’? As you say, prose *is* a medium. A medium is, by most people’s definition something that brings something across. Letters are a medium of communication. English can be a medium of instructions. Air can be a medium of sound. So what is prose the medium of? To say that a piece of literature whose prose is the medium of nothing is the best, seems inane to me. I’d like to reiterate that using this measure, instead of a different one, is a subjective choice. Just one I vehemently disagree with.
Finally I’d like to give you some homework, because if we look at you statement of what makes the best literature, I also disagree with the idea that Alice actually would be the best, because Alice clearly does have a message from the author, even if it flew over your head. You see, Lewis Carrol was the pseudonym of a mathematician by the name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The moment Dodgson wrote the book, a new wave of mathematics was coming into town. A more abstract mathematics. One the traditionalist Dodgson was not a fan of. He seemed to have believed that using such abstract math in reality would lead to nonsense. So in Alice he wrote many applications of that abstract math that lead to nonsense. Alice’s story is used to bring mathematical set-pieces to the table. Back when the book was new, debates about these mathematical ideas were more well known. And it is believed that many readers back in the day would have picked up Dodgsons idea of the absurdity of contemporary maths. So because of that, I’d urge to read more into the history of your supposed best work of literature, and see if afterwords you still believe the things you’ve spewed out.
P.S. Do you discount poetry as literature? Because if you want pure celebrations of language, I’m pretty sure there are many pieces of poetry (and thus, I’d say, pieces of literature) you can find that a purer than Alice. Ones without any story or message of than that to speak of.
“Alice is the only book to focus primarily on language, not messaging or theme.” Which is its automatic weak point. A literary masterpiece should have a message. Beautiful prose without meaning, while meritory, cannot be a work of genius.