I was watching Dogma the other day, and Matt Damon, who played Loki, said that the poem the Walrus and the Carpenter from Through the Looking Glass represents the downfalls of organized religion. Was this Lewis Caroll’s origional intent?
First off, in my less-than-humble opinion, “Dogma” was an incredibly stupid movie, Kevin Smith has no talent whatsoever, and NOBODY should take anything in that movie seriously.
But even if you DO take the movie seriously, Damon’s explanation of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” plainly isn’t correct. Moments after using that poem to “prove” to the credulous nun that God doesn’t exist, Damon’s character acknowledges that God DOES exist. He just enjoyed toying with the nun.
As for the “meaning” of the poem, there probably is none- Carroll simply enjoyed making up silly stories for little girls.
ok…dogma was pretty stupid, but definatly funny. And of course loki admitted that go existed, he’s the angle of death, so in the movie god had to exist. But we’re talkig about the idea of the poem, probably doesn’t cut it, and neither do opinions, thanx anyways.
Lewis Carrolls poesy was far more sophisticated than appears on the surface. However, his satire was very topical and very little of it is independent of its time. There are a number of good books about him, some of which will give you the background necessary to “get” the jokes. His goal was to write whimsy that would amuse a little girl, and the same time “flaming” some of the major political and religious figures of his time, IMHO, very succesfully. He was also a person with profound religious convictions, and one of the more brilliant minds of his time. Go figure.
According to the definitive source – Martin Gardner’s * The Annotated Alice*:
I haven’t see Dogma yet (my wife hates Smith; I think he is one of the best new filmmakers around), but the exchange sounds a lot like the rant against Star Wars in Chasing Amy. In other words, Smith likes drawing these connections, but knows there’s not truth to them.
Gahan Wilson, the great cartoonist, once wrote a brilliant short story called “The Sea Was West as Wet Could Be,” which focused on the grisly reality of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”…the destruction and devouring of the innocent, gulled oysters. He quotes:
“The sea was wet as wet could be
The sands were dry as dry
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky
No birds were flying overhead
There were no birds to fly.”
That part of the poem was, after all, a perfect description of a lifeless earth. It sounded beautiful at first, it sounded benign. But then you read it again and you realized that Carroll was describing barrenness and desolation.
Dynamite little story. I recommend that all Carroll fans find a copy and read it.
To get a feel for how Carroll’s mind worked even when it wasn’t juggling symbolic logic or spinning stories to amuse his young acquaintances, I’d recommend some of the less-known prose pieces, particularly “The New Belfry, Christ Church, Oxford”, “Twelve Months in a Curatorship (by One Who Has Tried It)”, and “Three Years in a Curatorship (by One Whom it Has Tried)” – I’ve probably bungled a word or punctuation mark in there somewhere but I’m too lazy to run upstairs to make sure.
“New Belfry” is one of my favorite pieces of sustained humorous invective, right up there with Twain’s “The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper”. The others are not brilliant, but they show how far the Rev. Dodgson would go in attempting to make even so pedestrian a subject as the state of the Common Room at Christ Church an object of whimsy.
In short, though he could be quite satirical when the mood struck him, I’ve always thought it questionable to subject anything he wrote to the Procrustean bed of any particular allegory.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard this interpretation many times before, including when taking the poem in an english class. I haven’t, however, been able any resources about this but I have found some things that might suggest that Lewis would do this. Much of Carroll’s work is parodying other things or questioning society. Check out this page on Lewis questioning Victorian etiquette:
http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/carroll/mutton.html
Carroll also was often very thoughtful in coming up with his comedy. His Achilles and the Tortoise especially shows this:
http://www.mathacademy.com/platonic_realms/encyclop/articles/carroll.html
Thus I would not dismiss this as simply silly. Also, the comparisons are too easy to make. Though some of them might be reading too much into the poem, there is still the obvious:
The earth was bear
Then the Walrus & the Carpenter appeared
Then the oysters started following them, and more and more followed (kind of like how religions progressed)
The Walrus & Carpenter led them, talking about many things including kings and as to whether pigs have wings (this could represent religions control, at the time, over the government and it answering theological questions)
Then after many oysters had grown fat (maybe off of the wealth the church had provided ;)) it was now the Walrus & the Carpenter’s turn to use them and they devoured them
A case could very easily thus be made that it is not religion itself Carroll is questioning, but the religions at that point in time. Though one could say you can find anything if you look for it, I find this very intriguing. The possibilities are definately there.
I think it unlikely that Rev. C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carrol) would have deliberately satirized religion.
And I think Martin Gardner is right in commenting that people read too much into it. I highly recommend his ANNOTATED ALICE and MORE ANNOTATED ALICE. The Walrus and Carpenter poem could could be satirizing any self-destructive fad (cocaine usage, for instance) that causes the unwary to follow the pack in the expectation of a joyful time that leads to destruction.
It is not surprising that there are death-images underlying the poem, there are death-images hidden in much of the ALICE
books.
I enthusiastically second CKDextHavn’s recommendation. The current edition of Gardner’s comments is The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, released 11/99. I haven’t bought it yet, but I’m 100 percent sure it’s great.
It should be noted that Carrol was a Opium addict and a Laudenum abuser.
He was also sexually attracted to little girls (5-14 yrs old.) Several nude photos of these girls, taken by Carrol; recently turned up, & were reprinted in a recent biography of him. No, the poses weren’t “innocent”.
Not a nice man. Or , at least one that I wouldn’t let near any kid that I cared about.
Question: Could Carrol have written the “Alice” stories as a
way of luring young girls to him?
Cecil answers the age old question was Lewis carol a perv?
Be nice if I spelled it right. Carroll.
I’m done now.
Umm, this is just my uneducated guess, but some poets and lyricists have been known to write poems and never, ever divulge what they were thinking when they wrote it, because they wanted to leave it open to interperation. Some is pretty obvious, some is not. Maybe Carrol just wanted his readers to pick an interpertation that worked for them.
Good call, Pepperlandgirl. Reminds me of a certain singer/songwriter I know. But I won’t bring that up…
Rob starts singing, “Bye, bye, Miss Americ…”
Bosda says: << Not a nice man. Or , at least one that I wouldn’t let near any kid that I cared about. >>
It’s all too easy to judge someone from the Victorian Era by modern standards, and find them lacking. You’d look hard to find someone from the period of 1850 - 1900, no matter how admirable, who advocated equal rights for women or blacks, for instance.
By the standards of his time, Charles Dodgson was a trifle eccentric, perhaps, but not considered a pervert. Cocaine use was fairly common and not illegal. Photography was a relatively new hobby, had only been around for 30 or 40 years. Dodgson always got the mother’s permission before photographing the children, nude or otherwise.
But I don’t think it’s fair to call him “not a nice man.” He was a dignified Victorian. If he were alive today, I am sure he would repress his attraction for little girls, which would not longer be even remotely acceptable. And he would never have got involved with cocaine, since it is now illegal.
In a book called The Best Kept Secret, the author
(whose name escapes me) points out that, while
Lewis Carroll probably had sexual fantasies
about little girls, there is no evidence he
ever tried to actually do anything. Everyone
has these thoughts, but you’re only a pervert
if you act on them.
As a aside, Alice Liddell had a serious romance
in college with Prince Leopold, who had the
royal hemophilia. Their parents forbid marriage,
but she named her second son Leopold, and he named
his only daughter Alice.