André Breton

    That an Anglican pastor should also be a distinguished professor of mathematics and a specialist in logic: no more than this is needed for nonsense to make its appearance in literature or at very least for it to make a spectacular reappearance (Lewis Carroll's most astounding poems show a constant, no doubt unsuspected filiation with certain "incoherent" poems of the French thirteenth century, known as fantasies, and with which only the name of Philippe de Beaumanoir has been associated). In Lewis Carroll, "nonsense" draws its importance from the fact that it constitutes in and of itself the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties. The characteristic of this subjective solution is to be coupled with an objective solution, one that is precisely poetic in nature: the mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children. Children's games (beginning with simple "word games"), as a lost means of reconciling action and reverie so as to achieve organic satisfaction, thus regain their dignity and validity. The forces that preside over "realism," infantile animism, and artificialism, the forces that militate for unconstrained morals, and that go into remission between the ages of five and twelve, are not immune to a systematic recuperation that threatens the harsh, inert world in which we are told we must live. Right hand closed as if on the knob of the exit (or entrance) door, though actually closed on an orange, stands a little girl whom the poet Lewis Carroll--in reality the honourable Mr. Dodgson, who is hiding behind this pseudonym--has just led before a mirror and who, in an attempt to understand how she can see her-self holding the fruit in her left hand while still feeling it in her right, supposes she is holding it in her right hand "through the looking glass." To be sure, this foreshadows an utterly authentic "against the grain." No one can deny that in Alice's eyes a world of oversight, inconsistency, and, in a word, impropriety hovers vertiginously around the centre of truth.
    Pink humour? Black humour? It's hard to decide: "The Hunting of the Snark," Mr. Aragon has noted, "appeared in the same year as Maldoror and A Season in Hell. In the shameful chains of those days of massacre in Ireland, of nameless oppression in factories where the ironic accounting of pleasure and pain preached by Bentham was established, while from Manchester rose in defiance the theory of free trade, what had become of human freedom? It rested entirely between the frail hands of Alice, in which this curious man had placed it."
    It seems no less abusive to present Lewis Carroll as a "political" rebel and to impute direct satirical intentions to his work. It is pure and simple deceit to suggest that the substitution of one regime for another could put an end to this sort of need. The fact is, the child will always set a fundamental opposition against those who try to mould him, and then diminish him, by arbitrarily limiting his magnificent field of experience. Anyone who has preserved a sense of revolt will recognise in Lewis Carroll their first teacher in the art of playing hooky.

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